inertia; not newness, not the way onward.  We grizzle every day.  I see no need of it.  Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.  Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides.  But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young.  Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.  This old age ought not to creep on a human mind.  In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred.  Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.  No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.  No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.  People wish to be settled:  only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises.  We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being.  Of lower states,—­of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat, but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable.  I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know.  The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new.  It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.  I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain.  Now for the first time seem I to know any thing rightly.  The simplest words,—­we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and better goals.  Character makes an overpowering present, a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of.  Character dulls the impression of particular events.  When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle or success.  We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty.  It was easy to him.  The great man is not convulsible or tormentable.  He is so much that events pass over him without much impression.  People say sometimes, “See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black events.”  Not if they still remind me of the black event,—­they have not yet conquered.  Is it conquest to be a gay and decorated sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing?  True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.