“The mind of the universe which we share,” is a phrase of Thoreau’s--a large and sane idea which shines like a star amid his many firefly conceits and paradoxes. The physical life of each of us is a part or rill of the universal life about us, as surely as every ounce of our strength is a part of gravity. With equal certainty, and under the same law, our mental lives flow from the fountain of universal mind, the cosmic intelligence which guides the rootlets of the smallest plant as it searches the soil for the elements it needs, and the most minute insect in availing itself of the things it needs. It is this primal current of life, the two different phases of which we see in our bodies and in our minds, that continues after our own special embodiments of it have ceased; in it is the real immortality. The universal mind does not die, the universal life does not go out. The jewel that trembles in the dewdrop, the rain that lends itself to the painting of the prismatic colors of the bow in the clouds, pass away, but their fountainhead in the sea does not pass away. The waters may make the wonderful circuit through the clouds, the air, the earth, and the cells and veins of living things, any number of times--now a globule of vapor in the sky, now a starlike crystal in the snow, now the painted mist of a waterfall, then the limpid current of a mountain brook--and still the sea remains unchanged. And though the life and mentality of the globe passes daily and is daily renewed, the primal source of those things is as abounding as ever. It is not you and I that are immortal; it is Creative Energy, of which we are a part. Our immortality is swallowed up in this. The poets, the prophets, the martyrs, the heroes, the saints--where are they? Each was but a jewel in the dew, the rain, the snowflake--throbbing, burning, flashing with color for a brief time and then vanishing, adorning the world for a moment and then caught away into the great abyss. “O spendthrift Nature!” our hearts cry out; but Nature’s spending is only the ceaseless merging of one form into another without diminution of her material or blurring of her types. Flowers bloom and flowers fade, the seasons come and the seasons go, men are born and men die, the world mourns for its saints and heroes, its poets and saviors, but Nature remains and is as young and spontaneous and inexhaustible as ever. Where is the comfort in all this to you and to me? There is none, save the comfort or satisfaction of knowing things as they are. We shall feel more at ease in Zion when we learn to distinguish substance from shadow, and to grasp the true significance of the world of which we form a part. In the end each of us will have had his day, and can say as Whitman does, “I have positively appeared. That is enough.”