Epimenides.

How true that there is nothing dead in this Universe; that what we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse order!  ’The leaf that lies rotting in moist winds,’ says one, ’has still force; else how could it rot?’ Our whole Universe is but an infinite Complex of Forces; thousandfold, from Gravitation up to Thought and Will; man’s Freedom environed with Necessity of Nature:  in all which nothing at any moment slumbers, but all is for ever awake and busy.  The thing that lies isolated inactive thou shalt nowhere discover; seek every where from the granite mountain, slow-mouldering since Creation, to the passing cloud-vapour, to the living man; to the action, to the spoken word of man.  The word that is spoken, as we know, flies-irrevocable:  not less, but more, the action that is done.  ‘The gods themselves,’ sings Pindar, ‘cannot annihilate the action that is done.’  No:  this, once done, is done always; cast forth into endless Time; and, long conspicuous or soon hidden, must verily work and grow for ever there, an indestructible new element in the Infinite of Things.  Or, indeed, what is this Infinite of Things itself, which men name Universe, but an action, a sum-total of Actions and Activities?  The living ready-made sum-total of these three,—­which Calculation cannot add, cannot bring on its tablets; yet the sum, we say, is written visible:  All that has been done, All that is doing, All that will be done!  Understand it well, the Thing thou beholdest, that Thing is an Action, the product and expression of exerted Force:  the All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.  Shoreless Fountain-Ocean of Force, of power to do; wherein Force rolls and circles, billowing, many-streamed, harmonious; wide as Immensity, deep as Eternity; beautiful and terrible, not to be comprehended:  this is what man names Existence and Universe; this thousand-tinted Flame-image, at once veil and revelation, reflex such as he, in his poor brain and heart, can paint, of One Unnameable dwelling in inaccessible light!  From beyond the Star-galaxies, from before the Beginning of Days, it billows and rolls,—­round thee, nay thyself art of it, in this point of Space where thou now standest, in this moment which thy clock measures.

Or apart from all Transcendentalism, 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