The first moral perception is always a shudder.  Carlyle sees the lifted judgment of a lie; his eye is filled, and he sees nothing beyond; but Nemesis is surgeon with probe and knife.  Our poisons are medicines and homoeopathic, the fumes of fear a remedy of sulphur for cutaneous sin.  The thought in which our terrors arrive is always at last a gospel, is glad tidings.  Dante, Paul, Swedenborg, Edwards have seen the pit.  It opens only in the holiness of such men,—­is a thunder out of clear sky, before which generations of the impure, like brute beasts, tremble and cower.  An equal moral genius will see that the ascension of an immortal Love has left behind this vacuum, mitigated, not deepened, by the furniture of devils and their flame.  Men strive in vain to be afflicted by a revelation of the best and worst.  The mind is naturally a form of gladness, and every window in us takes the sun.  Our genuine trouble is not extreme dread, but a perpetual restlessness and discontent.

The delight of contemplation has been in history a height without sustaining breadth, a needle, not a cube.  Genius has been tremulous, recluse,—­has been cherished in solitude with Nature,—­has been a feminine partiality among men, holding for gods its favorites, for dogs the refuse of mankind.  It still counts the practical life an interruption.  It is therefore only melancholy cheer, a forlorn ark with nine souls on the brine, a refuge from the world, not a delight of the world.  It lives not from God who is, but from a God who should be.  The true creative power is a calm of battle, a trust not for the closet, but the chariot, a torch that can be carried through the gusty market, a Ramadhan in the street.  It is no miracle to be calm in calm, to be quiet in bed,—­but to rule and lead without anxiety, to tame the beasts and elements, to build and unbuild cities with a song.  The great thought returns on society, floods out the heaped rubbish of custom, pours the old grandeurs of Nature through dry channels of Trade, Religion, Courtesy, and Art.  He is great who plays the game of life with decision, yet is always retired, and holds the life of life in reserve.  Such a man is demiurgic, for he puts down a hand on action through the sky.

From a happy or sufficient genius came the golden maxim, “Think of living.”  Strong men love life.  The system, so cheery and severe, seems to them worthy to be continued yonder and without end.  This day leading a better, itself good not leading alone,—­this presentiment,—­this solid increment of hard-won power,—­of what other stuff should our eternity be woven?  In wisdom first appears the present tense, an hour which is not mere transition, but something for itself.  There are men who live—­to live.  He who finds our destiny given beforehand in the nature of things has the leisure of God:  he has not only all the time that is, but spaces beyond, so that he will not be hurried by the falling-off of Time.  Leisure is a regard fixed not on the nearest trees