y-written book containing the first volume of his diary, do we
meet with those agonizing complaints of dryness, the distress of
doubt, the weary burden of insoluble difficulties, so common
heretofore. He seems, indeed, no longer battling; be victory is won;
but it remains to know what are the spoils and where they are to be
gathered. Of course there are interludes of his irrepressible
philosophizing on moral questions. And at the very end, under date of
May 23, 1844, we find the following:

"This afternoon brings me to the close of this book. How different
are the emotions with which I close it from those with which I opened
it at Brook Farm, now little more (a month) than a year ago! How
fruitful has this year been to me! How strangely mysterious and
beautiful! And now my soul foreshadows more the next year than ever
it presaged before. My life is beyond my grasp, and bears me on
will-lessly to its destined haven. Like a rich fountain it overflows
on every side; from within flows unceasingly the noiseless tide. The
many changes and unlooked-for results and circumstances, within and
without, of the coming year I would no more venture to anticipate
than to count the stars. It is to me now as if I had just been born,
and I live in the Sabbath of creation. Every thing that I see I feel
called on to give a name; it has a new meaning to me. Should this
life grow--what? It is a singular fact that, although conscious of a
more interior and potent force at work within, I am now more quiet
and will-less than I was when it at first affected me. I feel like a
child, full of joy and pliability; and all ambition of every
character seems to have left me. I see where I was heretofore, and
the degree of externality which was mixed with the influences that I
co-operated with, an externality from which I now feel that I have
been freed. It does seem to me that all worldly prospect that ever
was before me is gone, and as if I were weak, very weak, in the sight
of the world; so I really am. I feel no more potency than a babe. Yet
I have a will-less power of love which will conquer through me, and
which, O gracious Lord, I never dreamt of before."

In the middle of the above entry he thus notes an interruption, and
records a lesson taught by the late New England spring: "George and
Burrill Curtis came in, and I have just returned from a walk in the
woods with them. May the buds within blossom, and may their fruit
ripen in my prayers to Go