ctions. So come I to live in
thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the
soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense,"
man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the
soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will
learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that
the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will
weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live
with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in
his life and be content with all places and with any service he can
render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust
which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the
bottom of the heart.

*****

CIRCLES.

NATURE centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

X. CIRCLES.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is
the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described
the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its
circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious
sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in
considering the circular or compensatory character of every human
action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of
being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around
every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but
every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on
mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at
once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every
department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws
aft