Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts;
Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.


Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this
subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the
preachers taught. The documents,[94] too, from which the doctrine is
to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always
before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the
bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the
dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me,
also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present
action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition,
and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal
love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must
be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this
doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would
be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that
would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.