earthly, since,
in fact, I have no longer any heart for the perishable, the universe
appears to my eye in a transfigured form. The dead inert mass which
but choked up space has vanished; and, instead thereof, flows, and
waves, and rushes the eternal stream of life, and power, and deed--of
the original life, of thy life, O Infinite! For all life is thy life,
and only the religious eye pierces to the kingdom of veritable beauty.

I am related to thee, and all that I behold around me is related
to me. All is quick, all is soul, and gazes upon me with bright
spirit-eyes, and speaks in spirit-tones to my heart. Most diversely
sundered and severed, I behold, in all the forms without me, myself
again, and beam upon myself from them, as the morning sun, in thousand
dew-drops diversely refracted, glitters back toward itself.

Thy life, as the finite being can apprehend it, is volition which
shapes and represents itself by means of itself alone. This life, made
sensible in various ways to mortal eyes, flows through me and from me
downward, through the immeasurable whole of Nature. Here it streams,
as self-creating, self-fashioning matter, through my veins and
muscles, and deposits its fulness outside of me, in the tree, in
the plant, in the grass. As one connected stream, drop by drop, the
forming life flows in all shapes and on all sides, wherever my eye can
follow it, and looks upon me, from every point of the universe, with
a different aspect, as the same force which fashions my own body in
darkness and in secret. Yonder it waves free, and leaps and dances as
self-forming motion in the brute; and, in every new body, represents
itself as another separate, self-subsisting world--the same power
which, invisible to me, stirs and moves in my own members. All that
lives follows this universal current, this one principle of all
movement, which transmits the harmonious concussion from one end of
the universe to the other. The brute follows it without freedom.
I, from whom, in the visible world, the movement proceeds (without,
therefore, originating in me), follow it freely.

But, pure and holy, and near to thine own essence as aught, to mortal
apprehension, can be, this thy life flows forth as a band which binds
spirits with spirits in one, as air and ether of the one world of
Reason, inconceivable and incomprehensible, and yet lying plainly
revealed to the spiritual eye. Conducted by this light-stream, thought
floats unrestrained