nscendentalism, is it not a plain truth of sense,
which the duller mind can even consider as a truism, that human things
wholly are in continual movement, and action and reaction; working
continually forward, phasis after phasis, by unalterable laws, towards
prescribed issues? How often must we say, and yet not rightly lay
to heart: The seed that is sown, it will spring! Given the summer's
blossoming, then there is also given the autumnal withering: so is it
ordered not with seedfields only, but with transactions, arrangements,
philosophies, societies, French Revolutions, whatsoever man works with
in this lower world. The Beginning holds in it the End, and all that
leads thereto; as the acorn does the oak and its fortunes. Solemn
enough, did we think of it,--which unhappily and also happily we do not
very much! Thou there canst begin; the Beginning is for thee, and there:
but where, and of what sort, and for whom will the End be? All grows,
and seeks and endures its destinies: consider likewise how much grows,
as the trees do, whether we think of it or not. So that when your
Epimenides, your somnolent Peter Klaus, since named Rip van Winkle,
awakens again, he finds it a changed world. In that seven-years' sleep
of his, so much has changed! All that is without us will change while
we think not of it; much even that is within us. The truth that was
yesterday a restless Problem, has to-day grown a Belief burning to
be uttered: on the morrow, contradiction has exasperated it into mad
Fanaticism; obstruction has dulled it into sick Inertness; it is sinking
towards silence, of satisfaction or of resignation. To-day is not
Yesterday, for man or for thing. Yesterday there was the oath of Love;
today has come the curse of Hate. Not willingly: ah, no; but it could
not help coming. The golden radiance of youth, would it willingly have
tarnished itself into the dimness of old age?--Fearful: how we stand
enveloped, deep-sunk, in that Mystery of TIME; and are Sons of Time;
fashioned and woven out of Time; and on us, and on all that we have, or
see, or do, is written: Rest not, Continue not, Forward to thy doom!

But in seasons of Revolution, which indeed distinguish themselves from
common seasons by their velocity mainly, your miraculous Seven-sleeper
might, with miracle enough, wake sooner: not by the century, or seven
years, need he sleep; often not by the seven months. Fancy, for example,
some new Peter Klaus, sated with the jubile