trary limit to the progress of the human race. In science, art, literature—in all that exalts and embellishes life—the space yet available for progress comes as near infinitude as anything we are capable of conceiving. To one who stands in a valley, the horizon is near; let him climb a hill, and his view is expanded. When he attains a greater height the prospect appears still wider. The inventive genius of the world is rising higher and higher every day. Its prospect never appeared so utterly boundless as now. All that has been achieved, all the grand conquests that are recorded, are but an atom in the balance weighed when brought against the possibilities of the future.—The Inventive Age.
(1180)
FUTURE REUNION
Richard Watson Gilder is the author of this:
Call me not dead when I, indeed, have gone
Into the company of the ever-living
High and most glorious poets! Let thanksgiving
Rather be made. Say, "He at last hath won
Rest and release, converse supreme and wise,
Music and song and light of immortal faces;
To-day, perhaps, wandering in starry places,
He hath met Keats, and known him by his eyes.
To morrow (who can say) Shakespeare may pass—
And our lost friend just catch one syllable
Of that three-centuried wit that kept so well—
Or Milton, or Dante, looking on the grass
Thinking of Beatrice, and listening still
To chanted hymns that sound from the heavenly hill.
(1181)
FUTURE, THE
Ethel Ashton writes of the value of the things not yet in view:
Beyond the forms and the faces I see ineffable things,
Above the cry of the children I hear the beating of wings;
Gracing the graves of the weary are blossoms that never were blown,
And over the whole of knowledge stands all that shall yet be known.
The city is not my prison—the world can not stay me there;
For whole wide earth and its beauty there's beauty beyond compare.
The wealth of the wind-blown music, the gold of the sun are mine.
In light of the light men see not—in sight of the things divine.
For truer than all that is written is all that has not been told.
The yet unlived and unliving are truer than all the old.
The fairest is still the furthest; the life that has yet to be
Holds ever the past and present—itself the soul of the three.
—The Outlook (London).
(1182)
Future Uncertain—See To-morrow, Uncertainty of.
FUTURE WELFARE
A nation may now become educated; a
people may now be safe against poverty or
famine; the world is even now probably past
the critical point and sure of unintermitted
future progress. We may be allowed to
hope that later generations may continue to
see an interminable succession of advances,
made by coming men of science and by
learned engineers and mechanics that shall
continually add to the sum of human happiness
in this world, and make it continually
easier to prepare for a better world and a
brighter. Who knows but that the telescope,
the spectroscope, and other as yet uninvented
instruments may aid us in this by revealing
the secrets of other and more perfect lives
in other and more advanced worlds than
ours, despite the head-shaking of those who
know most of the probabilities? Who can
say that the life of the race may not be made
in a few generations, by this ever-accelerating
progress of which the century has seen but
the beginning, a true millennial introduction
into the unseen universe and the glorious life
that every man, Christian or skeptic, optimist,
or pessimist, would gladly hope for
and believe possible? (Text.)—R. H. Thurston, North American Review.
(1183)
