The Future is a great land; a man can not go round it in a day; he can not measure it with a bound; he can not bind its harvests into a single sheaf. It is wider than the vision, and has no end.
Yet always, day by day, hour by hour, second by second, the hard present is elbowing us off into that great land of the future. Our souls, indeed, wander to it, as to a home-land; they run beyond time and space, beyond planets and suns, beyond far-off suns and comets, until, like blind flies, they are lost in the blaze of immensity, and can only grope their way back to our earth, and our time, by the cunning of instinct.
Cut out the future—even that little future which is the EVENING of our life—and what a fall into vacuity. Forbid those earnest forays over the borders of Now, and on what spoils would the soul live?
For myself, I delight to wander there, and to weave every day the passing life into the coming life—so closely that I may be unconscious of the joining. And if so be that I am able, I would make the whole piece bear fair proportions and just figures—like those tapestries on which nuns work by inches and finish with their lives, or like those grand frescos which poet artists have wrought on the vaults of old cathedrals, gaunt and colossal—appearing mere daubs of carmine and azure, as they lay upon their backs, working out a hand’s breadth at a time—but when complete, showing symmetrical and glorious.
But not alone does the soul wander to those glittering heights where fame sits, with plumes waving in zephyrs of applause; there belong to it other appetities, which range wide and constantly over the broad future-land. We are not merely working, intellectual machines, but social puzzles, whose solution is the work of a life. Much as hope may mean toward the intoxicating joy of distinction, there is another leaning in the soul, deeper and stronger, toward those pleasures which the heart pants for, and in whose atmosphere the affections bloom and ripen.
The first may indeed be uppermost; it may be noisiest; it may drown with the clamor of midday the nicer sympathies. But all our day is not midday, and all our life is not noise. Silence is as strong as the soul; and there is no tempest so wild with blasts but has a wilder lull. There lies in the depth of every man’s soul a mine of affection, which from time to time will burn with the seething heat of a volcano and heave up lava-like monuments, through all the cold strata of his commoner nature.