how they look for the same dignity in all action, the same motive in every companion; I see what they have signified by heaven, a state wherein the best loved is the best:  but we must not be scornful, or miss to-day the common delight of living, the moderate hopes of the healthy multitude.  For no exceptional joy is so wonderful as the universality of joy, the love of life under every burden and stroke.  The beginning of all beatitude and ground of all is good digestion, good sleep, good-nature, and the cheer undeniable of an average human day.

But genius hurries on to expand our hope and dread to incalculable dimensions.  Hell is its first sudden down-look from uncertain flight, is earth and animalty seen from the sky.  The bad neither so see nor fear.  Few men ever reach a height from which they can sound such depth, and the popular talk is repetition without corresponding experience.  Hope and fear rise alike to sublimity before the boundless scope of our future.  Give the hour to folly, and you set back the dial-hand of destiny, you are so much behind your privilege in every following hour.  Eternity is displaced by the stumbling present as the earth by a falling pebble, and the act of this low morning is a stone cast in the sea of universal Being, which shakes and shoulders every drop of the deep.  The immensity of the universe does not dwarf, but magnifies our activity:  man is multiplied into the sum of all.  This deed, this breath dilates to the proportions of Spirit, and upheaves the low roof of Time, which is no sky for the soul.  Life becomes awful by its reaches:  its span from zenith to nadir, by moral parallax.  From gods we sound down to beasts and devils, from sky and fire to ice and mud.  Here are the true and final spaces:  in their startling contrast appears the grandeur of the moral law, like Chimborazo carrying all zones.  It offers hell and heaven, advancing inevitable, and leaves us never a dodge from choice.  Our dodge is a choice.  Man overtaken by inexorable need must do or go under in the tread-mill of Fate.  Not a fault, not a lack, but is so far damnation, with consequences not to be set forth in any prospect of fire.  When you begin to look down, the fear of centuries seems not exaggerated.  The remedy is in looking so vigorously and far as to see, beyond depth, again the sky and stars.  Look through; for toward that centre which is everywhere, we look.  Hell was situated under the earth; our first voyage teaches that there is no under-the-earth.  The widening of every path gives boundless dimension to sin, till we learn that the evil impulse alone does not extend.  It is soon exhausted both in attraction and effect,—­is no power, but some suspense of life.