eed of balance and wilful election.
For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place
yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates
all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to
right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the
wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of
beauty. If we will not be marplots with our miserable interferences, the
work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on
far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the
world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize
itself, as do now the rose, and the air, and the sun."

The poet declares that "sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier
things," but there is a certain morbidness in even the sensitive
delicacy and intensity of feeling that broods too deeply over the past.
It is a great art to learn to let things go--let them pass. They are a
part of the "flowing conditions." Even the pain and sorrow that result
from failures and changes in social relations; loss of friends, the
vanishing of friendships in which one had trusted,--even this phase of
trial, which is truly the hardest of all, can be best endured by closing
the door of consciousness on it, and creating a new world by that
miracle-working power of the soul. Friendships that hold within
themselves any permanent, any spiritual reality, come to stay. "Only
that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own
march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to
me, but, native of the same celestial altitude, repeats in its own all
my experience." Life has too many claims and privileges and resources to
waste it in lamentations. Let one look forward, not backward. Fairy
realms of enchantment beckon him on. These "flowing conditions of life"
are, really, the conditions of joy, of exhilaration, of stimulus to
energy rather than the reverse. They invest each day, each week, each
year, with the enchantment of the unknown and the untried. They produce
the possibility of perpetual hope, and continuity of hope is continuity
of endeavor. Without hope, faith, and courage, life would be impossible;
and courage and all power of energy and endeavor depend entirely upon
hope and faith. If a man believes in nothing and is in a state of
despair and not hope, his energies are paralyzed. But hope lend