hinker is compelled to
interrogate his consciousness more deeply and sacredly; and being
cut off from that sympathy which has its foundation in similarity of
temperaments and traditions, he must fall back with simpler abandonment
upon the pure idea, and must seek responses from that absolute nature of
man which the men of his time are not human enough to afford him. This
absolute nature, this divine identity in man, underrunning times,
temperaments, individualities, is that which poet and prophet must
address: yet to speak _to_ it, they must speak _from_ it; to be heard
by the universal heart, they must use a universal language. But
this marvellous vernacular can be known to him alone whose heart is
universal, in whom even self-love is no longer selfish, but is a pure
respect to his own being as it is Being. Well it is, therefore, that
here and there one man should be so denied all petty and provincial
claim to attention, that only by speaking to Man as Man, and in the
sincerest vernacular of the human soul, he can find audience; for thus
it shall become his need, for the sake of joy no less than of duty, to
know himself purely as man, and to yield himself wholly to his immortal
humanity. Thus does fixed custom force back the most moving souls, until
they touch the springs of inspiration, and are indued with power: then,
at once potent and pure, they gush into history, to be influences, to
make epochs, and to prevail over that through whose agency they first
obtained strength.

Thus, everywhere, through all realms, do the opposite principles of Rest
and Motion depend upon and reciprocally empower each other. In every
act, mechanical, mental, social, must both take part and consent
together; and upon the perfection of this consent depends the quality
of the action. Every progress is conditioned on a permanence; every
permanence _lives_ but in and through progress. Where all, and with
equal and simultaneous impulse, strives to move, nothing can move, but
chaos is come; where all refuses to move, and therefore stagnates, decay
supervenes, which is motion, though a motion downward.

Having made this general statement, we proceed to say that there are two
chief ways in which these universal opposites enter into reciprocation.
The first and more obvious is the method of alternation, or of rest
_from_ motion; the other, that of continuous equality, which may be
called a rest _in_ motion. These two methods, however, are not mu