g power, is a new phase of energy added to the energy
of the race.
This fact confers on each individual man a strange impressiveness and
power. It gives a new significance to the fact that I am. I am something
different from what has been, or ever shall be. In the great whirling
myriads, I am distinguished and apart. I am an appreciable factor in
universal development and a being of elemental power. By every true
thought of mine the race becomes wiser. By every right deed, its
inheritance of tradition is uplifted; by every high affection, its
horizon of love is enlarged. We can bequeath to others this new
spiritual energy of our lives.
This thought gives us a new zest for life. There is an appetite which is
of the soul. It is this wish for growth, for the development of our
powers, for a larger life for ourselves and for those who shall
come after us.
Is there any one who wishes to stay always where he is to-day?--to be
always what he is this morning? Beyond the hill-top lies our dream. Not
all the voices that call men from place to place are audible ones. We
hear whispers from a far-off leader; we are beckoned by an unseen guide.
Out of ancestry, tradition, talent, and training each departs to
his own way.
What calls is not largeness of place--it is largeness of ideal. To each
of us, thinking of this one and that one who has taken a large part in
the shaping of the world, there comes a feeling: Beside all these I am
in a narrow way! What can I think that shall be worth the consideration
of the race? What can I do that shall be a stepping-stone to progress?
What can I hope that shall unseal other eyes to the universal glory,
comfort others in the universal pain? We say: I do not want to be mewed
up here, while others are out where thrones and empires are sweeping by!
I do not want to parse verbs, add fractions, and mark ledgers, while
others are the poets, the singers, the statesmen, the rulers, and the
wealth-controllers of the world! We wish to step out of the trivial
experience into that which is significant. Each day brings uneasiness of
soul. "Man's unhappiness," says Carlyle, "as I construe it, comes of his
greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his
cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite." Says Tennyson:
"_It is not death for which we pant,
But life, more life, and fuller, that we want_."
These aspirations are prophetic. Does a clod-hopper dream? We move
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