Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/778

770 his own power, which he must hasten to overtake. He weighs himself often in thought; yet it is not his present, but a presumptive value, of which he is taking account. We are continually entering into our future, and it is so near us, we are already in every hour so full of it, that we draw without fraud on the credit of to-morrow. The student who has bought his first law-book is already a great counsellor. With the Commentaries he carries home consideration and the judicial habit. Some wisdom he imbibes through his pores and those of the sheepskin cover. Now he is grave and prudent, a man of the world and of authority; but if he had chosen differently, and brought home the first book of Theology, his day would have been tinted with other colors. For every choice carries a future involved in itself, and we begin to taste that when we take our course toward it. The habit of leaning forward and living in advance of himself has made its mark upon every man. We look not at the history or performance of the stranger, but at his pretensions. These are written in his dress, his air and attitude, his tone and occupation. The past is already nothing, the present is sliding away; to know any man, we must keep our eyes out in advance on the road he is following. For man is an involuntary, if not a willing traveller. Time does not roll from under his feet, but he is carried along with the current, and can never again be where or what he was. Nothing in his experience can ever be quite repeated. If you see the same trees and hills, they do not appear the same from year to year. Yesterday they were new and strange; you and they were young together. To-day they are familiar and disregarded. Soon they will be old friends, prattling to gray hairs of the brown locks and bounding breath of youth.

The pioneer of our growth is Imagination. Desire and Hope go on before into the wilderness of the unknown; they open paths; they make a clearing; they build and settle firmly before we ourselves in will and power arrive at this opening, but they never await our coming. They are the "Fore-runners," off again deeper into the vast possibility of being. The boy walks in a dream of to-morrow. Two bushels of hickory-nuts in his bag are no nuts to him, but silver shillings; yet neither are the shillings shillings, but shining skates, into which they will presently be transmuted. Already he is on the great pond by the roaring fire, or ringing away into distant starry darkness with a sparkling brand. Already, before his first skates are bought, before he has seen the coin that buys them, he is dashing and wheeling with his fellows, a leader of the flying train.

That early fore-reaching is a picture of our entire activity. "Care is taken," said Goethe, "that the trees do not grow into the sky"; but man is that tree which must outgrow the sky and lift its top into finer air and sunshine. The essential seed is Growth; not shell and bark, nor kernel, but a germ which pierces the soil and lifts the stone. Spirit is such a germ, and perpetual reinforcement is its quality; so that the great Being is known to us as a becoming Creator, adding himself to himself, and life to life, in perpetual emanation.

The boy's thought never stops short of some personal prowess. It is ability that charms him. To be a man, as he understands manliness, is to have the whole planet for a gymnasium and play-ground. He would like to have been on the other side of Hydaspes when Alexander came to that stream. But he soon discovers that wit is the sword of sharpness,—that he is the ruler who can reach the deepest desire of man and satisfy that. If there is power in him, he becomes a careful student, examines everything, examines his own enthusiasm, examines his last examination, tries every estimate again and again. He distrusts his tools, and then distrusts his own distrust, lifting himself by the very boot-straps in his metaphysics, to get at some foundation which will not move. He will know what he is