Inaugural Post: Belated thoughts in re: the New Year

Emerson on the New Year (prior to abandoning the ministry).

This night brings the year to a close. The planet on whose surface the Creator has placed us, is now finishing one more of its revolutions round the sun. One act more in the great labour of external Nature is concluded. The earth has fulfilled the round of its four seasons, has fed its population of animals from the worm up through the fish, insect, bird, and beast, to man with another harvest, and cooled its zones with the breath of a new winter; and now the signs in heaven admonish us that the journey is ended and the goal is reached--that the vast orbit we traverse has been measured to its last etherial miles, that one verse more of the eternal song of the stars is sung, and that another year is added to the life of its inhabitants.

Be it so. What is there in this time to cause anxiety? God is great. Time is nothing to Him. Each moment his power is to his works a new creation. And so if the new year is done a new year shall begin; the Earth is not weary and the sum is not dim. There is no need that this ship of the heavens which has floated us so far, should now stop after its mighty voyage to refit or refresh itself, but without cessation, without rest, away it shall go as a bird on its solitary and grand flight through 1500,000 miles in a day, bearing its precious freight through the deeps of space forever and ever.

From The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert J. Von Frank, Teresa Toulouse, Wesley T Mott: 1989, p112