56 EMERSON’S ESSAYS

Truth and Right, and calms itself with know-
ing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the
Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea,—long intervals of
time, years, centuries,—are of no account. This
which I think and feel underlay every former state
of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my
present, and what is called life, and what is called
death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power
ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the mo-
ment of transition from a past to a new state, in the
shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This
one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes,‘ for
that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to
poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the
saint with the rogue, shoves Iesus and Iudas equally
aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? In-
asmuch as the soul is present, there will be power
not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a
poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of
that which relies, because it works and is. Who

has more obedience than I masters me, though he

should not raise his finger. Round him I must re-
volve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it
rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do
not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man
or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
principles, by the law of nature must overpower
and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets,
who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly
reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all
into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the at-