nce arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water;
or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my
vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read
or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in
flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and
repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed
the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil
eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds
pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as
initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there,
and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in
infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this
august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages,
young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what
a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new
beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new
yet unapproachable America I have found in the West:--

"Since neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
A man be found who their first entrance knew."

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add that there
is that in us which changes not and which ranks all sensations and
states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which
identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his
body; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it
sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not
what you have done or forborne, but at whose command you have done or
forborne it.

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost,--these are quaint names, too narrow
to cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still
kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named,--ineffable cause,
which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphatic
symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous)
thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; and the
metaphor of each has become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius has
not been the least successful in his generalization. "I fully understand
language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor."--"I beg