evil impulse alone does not extend. It is soon exhausted both in
attraction and effect,--is no power, but some suspense of life.

The first moral perception is always a shudder. Carlyle sees the lifted
judgment of a lie; his eye is filled, and he sees nothing beyond; but
Nemesis is surgeon with probe and knife. Our poisons are medicines and
homoeopathic, the fumes of fear a remedy of sulphur for cutaneous sin.
The thought in which our terrors arrive is always at last a gospel, is
glad tidings. Dante, Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit. It
opens only in the holiness of such men,--is a thunder out of clear sky,
before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and
cower. An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal
Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the
furniture of devils and their flame. Men strive in vain to be afflicted
by a revelation of the best and worst. The mind is naturally a form of
gladness, and every window in us takes the sun. Our genuine trouble is
not extreme dread, but a perpetual restlessness and discontent.

The delight of contemplation has been in history a height without
sustaining breadth, a needle, not a cube. Genius has been tremulous,
recluse,--has been cherished in solitude with Nature,--has been a
feminine partiality among men, holding for gods its favorites, for dogs
the refuse of mankind. It still counts the practical life an
interruption. It is therefore only melancholy cheer, a forlorn ark with
nine souls on the brine, a refuge from the world, not a delight of the
world. It lives not from God who is, but from a God who should be. The
true creative power is a calm of battle, a trust not for the closet, but
the chariot, a torch that can be carried through the gusty market, a
Ramadhan in the street. It is no miracle to be calm in calm, to be quiet
in bed,--but to rule and lead without anxiety, to tame the beasts and