But genius hurries on to expand our hope and dread to incalculable
dimensions. Hell is its first sudden down-look from uncertain flight, is
earth and animalty seen from the sky. The bad neither so see nor fear.
Few men ever reach a height from which they can sound such depth, and
the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience. Hope
and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our
future. Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of
destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour.
Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling
pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone cast in the sea of
universal Being, which shakes and shoulders every drop of the deep. The
immensity of the universe does not dwarf, but magnifies our activity:
man is multiplied into the sum of all. This deed, this breath dilates to
the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is
no sky for the soul. Life becomes awful by its reaches: its span from
zenith to nadir, by moral parallax. From gods we sound down to beasts
and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud. Here are the true and
final spaces: in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the
moral law, like Chimborazo carrying all zones. It offers hell and
heaven, advancing inevitable, and leaves us never a dodge from choice.
Our dodge is a choice. Man overtaken by inexorable need must do or go
under in the tread-mill of Fate. Not a fault, not a lack, but is so far
damnation, with consequences not to be set forth in any prospect of
fire. When you begin to look down, the fear of centuries seems not
exaggerated. The remedy is in looking so vigorously and far as to see,
beyond depth, again the sky and stars. Look through; for toward that
centre which is everywhere, we look. Hell was situated under the earth;
our first voyage teaches that there is no under-the-earth. The widening
of every path gives boundless dimension to sin, till we learn that the