(Visit Holt International)
I trace the river, swelling out by degrees from the spring to a rill, from the rill to a brook, from the brook to a mill-stream, from the stream to a river, taking itself all minor tribulations, and rolling on with a current that bears the ship and the steamboat with the easiest majesty, still cleaving its way through meadow and hill, through forest and mountain, untroubled toward the sea. Shall I believe, then, that when that river has rounded a promontory, beyond which, as yet, I can not follow it, it is all at once dissolved into mist? or emptied into a cavern so deep and obscure that no trace of the stream reappears on earth? Nay, but I know--tho I have not seen the end, it is certain to me as if already my vision embraced it-- that that river flows on continuous to the ocean, and mingles its wave with all the waters that gird the globe, and are drawn into the skies!
And so I know that the great soul of man, aspiring from it's birth to a nobler development, still matching its companions, still surpassing its circumstances, with ideas within it which no present can unfold, and with a deep self-centered force, to which the body is (only thought to be) an accident, will still go on when this body has decayed, and be only nobler and princelier in each power when mingling with that illustrious concourse of intelligent and pure beings who already have been gathered in the courts of the future! It were to reverse and violently over-ride every palpable probability, to deny or to doubt this! (Text.) -- Richard S. Storrs.
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