'
"Have a purpose, and do with your utmost might:
You will finish your work on the other side,
When you wake in his likeness, satisfied."
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE SHADOWS WE CAST.
"The smallest bark on life's tumultuous ocean
Will leave a track behind for evermore;
The slightest wave of influence set in motion
Extends and widens to the eternal shore."
Every one of us casts a shadow. There hangs about us a sort of
penumbra,--a strange, indefinable something,--which we call personal
influence, which has its effect on every other life on which it falls.
It goes with us wherever we go. It is not something we can have when
we want to have it, and then lay aside when we will, as we lay aside a
garment. It is something that always pours out from our life, like
light from a lamp, like heat from flame, like perfume from a flower.
No one can live, and not have influence. Says Elihu Burritt: "No human
being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the
sum total of human happiness, not only of the present, but of every
subsequent age of humanity. No one can detach himself from this
connection. There is no sequestered spot in the universe, no dark
niche along the disk of non-existence, to which he can retreat from his
relations to others, where he can withdraw the influence of his
existence upon the moral destiny of the world; everywhere his presence
or absence will be felt, everywhere he will have companions who will be
better or worse for his influence.
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