A SUMMER MORNING. 91 



Now all that insensibly growing servitude slips 

 from me ; once more I am free and my own. The 

 inexhaustible life that is behind all visible things, 

 constantly flowing in upon us when we keep the 

 channels open, recreates whatever was noblest and 

 truest in me. With Nature, I believe ; and believ 

 ing, I also share in the universal worship. 



Emerson somewhere says, writing about the most 

 difficult of Plato s dialogues, that one must often 

 wait long for the hour when one is strong enough 

 to grapple with and master it, but sooner or later 

 the fitting morning will come. It is the morning 

 which gives us faith in the most arduous achieve 

 ments, and invigorates us to undertake them. In 

 the morning all things are possible because the 

 heavens and the earth are so visibly united in the 

 fellowship of common life ; the one pouring down 

 a measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, the 

 other eagerly, worshipfully receptive. Nature has 

 no more inspiring truth for us than this constant 

 and complete enfolding of our life by a higher and 

 vaster life, this unbroken play of a diviner purpose 

 and force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing 

 really dies ; all things are conserved by an energy 

 which transforms, reorganizes, and perpetuates in 

 new and finer forms all visible things. The silence 

 of winter counterfeits the repose of death, but it is 

 not even a pause of life ; invisibly to us the great 

 movement goes on in the earth under our feet. 

 While we watch by our household fires, the unseen 



