16.  The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion.  But the drag is never taken from the wheel.  Wherever the impulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation.  All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella[524] or self-heal.  After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws.  These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men.  Our servitude to particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations.  We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks.  They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner:  it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,—­of our condensation and acceleration of objects:  but nothing is gained:  nature cannot be cheated:  man’s life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.  In these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in impulses.  Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side.  And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul.  The reality is more excellent than the report.  Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball.  The divine circulations never rest nor linger.  Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.  The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.  Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized.  Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated.  That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distills its essence into every drop of rain.  Every moment instructs and every object:  for wisdom is infused into every form.  It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.

SHAKSPEARE;[525] OR, THE POET

[Transcriber’s Note:  Shakspeare is spelled as “Shakspeare” as well as “Shakespeare” in this book.  The original spellings have been retained.]