I trace the river, swelling out by degrees from the spring
to a rill, from the rill to a brook, from the brook to a
mill-stream, from the stream to a river, taking into itself all
minor tributaries, and rolling on with a current that bears the
ship and the steamboat with the easiest majesty, still cleaving
its way through meadow and hill, through forest and mountain,
untroubled toward the sea. Shall I believe, then, that when that
river has rounded a promontory, beyond which, as yet, I can not
follow it, it is all at once dissolved into mist? or emptied
into a cavern so deep and obscure that no trace of the stream
reappears upon the earth? Nay, but I know--tho I have not seen
the end, it is as certain to me as if already my vision embraced
it--that that river flows on continuous to the ocean, and
mingles its wave with all the waters that gird the globe, and
are drawn into the skies!
And so I know that the great soul of man, aspiring from its
birth to a nobler development, still matching its companions,
still surpassing its circumstances, with ideas within it which
no present can unfold, and with a deep self-centered force,
to which the body is only an accident, will still go on when
this body has decayed, and be only nobler and princelier in
each power when mingling with that illustrious concourse of
intelligent and pure beings who already have been gathered in
the courts of the future! It were to reverse and violently
over-ride every palpable probability, to deny or to doubt this!
(Text.)--RICHARD S. STORRS.
(1178)
* * * * *
Sometime--dear hands shall clasp our own once more,
And hearts that touched our hearts long years before
Shall come to meet us in the morning land;
And then, at last, our souls shall understand
How, tho He hid His meaning from our sight,
Yet God was always true and always right;
And how, tho smiles were often changed for tears,
Along this tangled pathway of the years,
Yet only so these lives of yours and mine
Have caught the likeness of the life divine. (Text.)
(1179)
=Future Life, Pledge of=--See LIFE A CYCLE.