On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History quotes

and thus, as it were, not exhaust my subject, but so much as break ground on it! At all events, I must make the attempt.

It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.

A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all.

Let us never forget this. It seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth to any faith even in savage men.

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

We shall not see into the true heart of anything, if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we do not reject the quackeries altogether;

if we do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, with which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice.

Man everywhere is the born enemy of lies.

I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr. Turner's Account of his Embassy to that country, and see.

but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would we believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should require.

It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man.

Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

Think, would we believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man.

Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about the Universe;

what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight.

It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk:

revealing the inner Splendor to him. Cannot we understand how these men worshipped Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism.

Worship is transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or measure; that is worship.

To these primeval men, all things and everything they saw exist beside them were an emblem of the Godlike, of some God.

Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great?

Society is founded on Hero-worship.

All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is "sacred" enough withal! The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans.

The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say!

They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes.

We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then;

… liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it.

The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning.

His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly;

The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him forth—! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?"

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief.

And what is notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be.

Hero-worship endures forever while man endures.

Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and burst out round him into very curious Hero-worship, in that last act of his life when they "stifle him under roses."

But the way in which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,—what sort of fact it became for him,—was and is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal, ever-operating laws.

The world of Nature, for every man, is the Fantasy of Himself.

This world is the multiplex "Image of his own Dream." Who knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these Pagan Fables owe their shape!

The gigantic image of his natural face, legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain.

The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.

To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by his fellow-men.

This, I should say, is more sincerely done in the Scandinavian than in any Mythology I know. Sincerity is the great characteristic of it. Superior sincerity (far superior) consoles us for the total want of old Grecian grace.

Sincerity, I think, is better than grace.

I feel that these old Northmen wore looking into Nature with open eye and soul: most earnest, honest; childlike, and yet manlike; with a great-hearted simplicity and depth and freshness, in a true, loving, admiring, unfearing way. A right valiant, true old race of men.

that Odin would have no favor for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave.

Valor is still value.

The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious;

Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value.

The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear.

We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear under his feet.

The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime from the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries. Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times.

Thought does not die, but only is changed.

The first man that began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all.

Speciosities are specious—ah me!—a Cagliostro, many Cagliostros, prominent world-leaders, do prosper by their quackery, for a day. It is like a forged bank-note; they get it passed out of their worthless hands: others, not they, have to smart for it.

Nature bursts up in fire-flames, French Revolutions and such like, proclaiming with terrible veracity that forged notes are forged.

But of a Great Man especially, of him I will venture to assert that it is incredible he should have been other than true. It seems to me the primary foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, this.

They are the product of an Age of Scepticism: they indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth.

A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!

If he do not know and follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else be works in, it is no house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap. It will not stand for twelve centuries, to lodge a hundred and eighty millions;

On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults?

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart"? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins.

What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps."

Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine?

The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;—that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and fact; is dead: it is "pure" as dead dry sand is pure.

Yet withal, if we take this for an argument of the truth or falsehood of a religion, there is a radical mistake in it. The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword!

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him.

It is the way with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat. What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question.

Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat.

Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,—insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure;

It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs.

Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero.

They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.

Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease.

Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.

Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their "point of honor" and the like. Not by flattering our appetites;

Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher: one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their "point of honor" and the like.

Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers.

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,—nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest;

all men have accent of their own,—though they only notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical,—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song.

All deep things are Song.

It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies:

He answers, with fixed stern pride: "

If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, nunquam revertar.

"

Ah yes, he had been in Hell;—in Hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out divine are not accomplished otherwise.

Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?

Born as out of the black whirlwind;—true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.

rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth.

He is world-great not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep.

Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity, consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision;

And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"!

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object.

In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that!

and Greece, where is it? Desolate for thousands of years; away, vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life and existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King Agamemnon!

Greece was; Greece, except in the words it spoke, is not.

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his "uses." A human soul who has once got into that primal element of Song, and sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the depths of our existence;

Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce?

There is, in this world, no other entirely fatal person.

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties?

How much in Shakspeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like roots, like sap and forces working underground!

Speech is great; but Silence is greater.

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true battle,—the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakspeare greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer.

Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch.

Such laughter, like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.

We have no room to speak of Shakspeare's individual works; though perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed as Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is! A thing which might, one day, be done.

His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of Nature.

Whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the inarticulate deeps.

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on;

never have had any Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakspeare? Really it were a grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:

Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare!

Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakspeare!

that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one:

Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak!

The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong with so many bayonets, Cossacks and cannons; and does a great feat in keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness.

It is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind we see it summed up into great historical amounts,—revolutions, new epochs.

Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does not stand "in the ocean of the other Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither!

Men find no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,—all Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these.

but it must be in some wider, wiser way than this. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong?

Why should we misknow one another, fight not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform?

All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting down Jotuns, shall be welcome. Luther's battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with us, not against us.

This is one of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are filled.

"You do not believe," said Coleridge; "you only believe that you believe."

It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours.

that is not the necessity of Nature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of Time. A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another;—and with boundless gratitude to that other!

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another. Every son of Adam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this sense; no mortal is doomed to be an insincere man.

Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King. Hero-worship never dies, nor can die. Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlasting in the world:—and there is this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and sincerities.

Not by shutting your eyes, your "private judgment;" no, but by opening them, and by having something to see!

Luther's message was deposition and abolition to all false Popes and Potentates, but life and strength, though afar off, to new genuine ones.

it was he that conquered the world for us!—See, accordingly, was not Luther himself reverenced as a true Pope, or Spiritual Father, being verily such? Napoleon, from amid boundless revolt of Sansculottism, became a King.

Hero-worship never dies, nor can die.

Loyalty and Sovereignty are everlasting in the world:—and there is this in them, that they are grounded not on garnitures and semblances, but on realities and sincerities. Not by shutting your eyes, your "private judgment;"

you cannot build an edifice except by plummet and level,—at right-angles to one another! In all this wild revolutionary work, from Protestantism downwards, I see the blessedest result preparing itself: not abolition of Hero-worship, but rather what I would call a whole World of Heroes.

If Hero mean sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?

A world all sincere, a believing world: the like has been; the like will again be,—cannot help being. That were the right sort of Worshippers for Heroes:

It is strange, it is great. It leads us back to another Birth-hour, in a still meaner environment, Eighteen Hundred years ago,—of which it is fit that we say nothing, that we think only in silence; for what words are there!

The Age of Miracles past? The Age of Miracles is forever here—!

I find it altogether suitable to Luther's function in this Earth, and doubtless wisely ordered to that end by the Providence presiding over him and us and all things, that he was born poor, and brought up poor, one of the poorest of men.

afar off at Wittenberg he, Luther, could not get lived in honesty for it; he remonstrated, resisted, came to extremity; was struck at, struck again, and so it came to wager of battle between them! This is worth attending to in Luther's history.

Perhaps no man of so humble, peaceable a disposition ever filled the world with contention.

We cannot but see that he would have loved privacy, quiet diligence in the shade; that it was against his will he ever became a notoriety. Notoriety: what would that do for him? The goal of his march through this world was the Infinite Heaven;

He dooms the Monk's writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome,—probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century before.

A short argument, fire.

Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable promises and safe-conducts; an earnest, not rebellious kind of man: they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon "three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long;"

How could he? "Confute me," he concluded, "by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience.

Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!

"—It is, as we say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present: the germ of it all lay there:

sure to come. But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do.

Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George," of Leipzig, a great enemy of his, "Duke George is not equal to one Devil,"—far short of a Devil!

"If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running." What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into—!

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage was ferocity, mere coarse disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many do. Far from that.

With Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this of mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is.

The tiger before a stronger foe—flies: the tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel.

I know few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure as water welling from the rock.

His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from his flute, he says.

Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other; I could call these the two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things had room.

Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face; with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face.

They understand little of the man who cite this in discredit of him!—I will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men.

Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,—so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great!

Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet;

one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,—so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great!

Ah yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers!

A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Nature and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven.

all joined in solemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here.—Hah! These men, I think, had a work!

The weak thing, weaker than a child, becomes strong one day, if it be a true thing.

Puritanism was only despicable, laughable then; but nobody can manage to laugh at it now. Puritanism has got weapons and sinews; it has firearms, war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm;

Mother? Mother of God? said Knox, when the turn came to him: This is no Mother of God: this is "a pented bredd,"—a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it!

She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshipped, added Knox; and flung the thing into the river.

It was not very cheap jesting there: but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a pented bredd: worship it he would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the Cause they had was the true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God's making; it is alone strong.

How many pented bredds, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshipped!

—This Knox cannot live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic: it is the grand gift he has.

but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in sincerity, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast.

"He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at his grave, "who never feared the face of man."

He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an Old-Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid narrow-looking adherence to God's truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth:

Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless Queen;—but the still more hapless Country, if she were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities:

"Who are you," said she once, "that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?"—"Madam, a subject born within the same," answered he.

Reasonably answered! If the "subject" have truth to speak, it is not the "subject's" footing that will fail him here.—

Tolerance has to tolerate the unessential; and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer.

But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate!

We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We do not "tolerate" Falsehoods, Thieveries, Iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable!

Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what then?

Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the general sum-total of Disorder.

Order is Truth,—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together.

Every such man is the born enemy of Disorder; hates to be in it: but what then? Smooth Falsehood is not Order; it is the general sum-total of Disorder.

Order is Truth,—each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it: Order and Falsehood cannot subsist together.

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him; which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His History, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this.

rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, "pointed upwards with his finger," and so died.

Honor to him! His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it never.

One word more as to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivable offence in him is, that he wished to set up Priests over the head of Kings. In other words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a Theocracy.

We will praise the Hero-priest rather, who does what is in him to bring them in; and wears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth.

The Earth will not become too godlike!

Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their appearance in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world.

to no other man of any. Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in society.

He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form!

He is an accident in society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.

Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time;

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form!

In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece!

Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life.

No magic Rune is stranger than a Book.

All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of Books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the Books themselves! It depends on what we read, after all manner of Professors have done their best for us.

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.

But to the Church itself, as I hinted already, all is changed, in its preaching, in its working, by the introduction of Books.

what we were to do as a nation. But does not, though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether?

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.

It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,—very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy:

I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the world, there is no class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may read,—and draw inferences from.

"Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will take care of itself; and of you too, if you do not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont.

His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half paralyzed!

The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries.

Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man.

The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE.

"Tree" and "Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine!

I say that it does not go by wheel-and-pinion "motives" self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities;

For the Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things.

A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.

The world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole? Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dexterous Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not done.

Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in.

Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth?

Or indeed what of the world and its victories? Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead?

One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore!

It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's being saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves:

Figure him there, with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger in this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better!

The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of "fourpence-halfpenny a day."

Yet a giant invincible soul; a true man's. One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford: the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned College Servitor stalking about, in winter-season, with his shoes worn out;

how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door; and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thoughts,—pitches them out of window!

Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary!

Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes. An original man;—not a second-hand, borrowing or begging man.

Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal.

It is a type of the man's life, this pitching away of the shoes.

An original man;—not a second-hand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get.

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he?

Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise.

I could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World of Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic.

It should stand rather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque to his valet-de-chambre. Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved;—admirable to no valet.

The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him!

Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to do that;—and one of the world's wants, in this as in other senses, is for most part want of such.

that his soul, namely, is a mean valet-soul! He expects his Hero to advance in royal stage-trappings, with measured step, trains borne behind him, trumpets sounding before him. It should stand rather, No man can be a Grand-Monarque to his valet-de-chambre.

Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically carved;—admirable to no valet.

The Valet does not know a Hero when he sees him! Alas, no: it requires a kind of Hero to do that;—and one of the world's wants, in this as in other senses, is for most part want of such.

He is not what I call a strong man. A morbid, excitable, spasmodic man; at best, intense rather than strong. He had not "the talent of Silence," an invaluable talent; which few Frenchmen, or indeed men of any sort in these times, excel in!

The suffering man ought really "to consume his own smoke;" there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire,—which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength! A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then.

Rousseau has not depth or width, not calm force for difficulty; the first characteristic of true greatness. A fundamental mistake to call vehemence and rigidity strength!

A man is not strong who takes convulsion-fits; though six men cannot hold him then.

He that can walk under the heaviest weight without staggering, he is the strong man. We need forever, especially in these loud-shrieking days, to remind ourselves of that.

The whole world got itself supplied with anecdotes, for light laughter, for a certain theatrical interest, from these perversions and contortions of poor Jean Jacques. Alas, to him they were not laughing or theatrical; too real to him!

The contortions of a dying gladiator: the crowded amphitheatre looks on with entertainment; but the gladiator is in agonies and dying.

And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers, with his contrat-social, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality;

one of those men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut.

The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which threw us all into tears."

This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear this man speak!

Waiters and ostlers:—they too were men, and here was a man!

I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things I ever heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar with him. That it was speech distinguished by always having something in it.

can either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,—with unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any power under the sky.

Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice.

Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it;

This month he is a ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes!

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

I admire much the way in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished; not abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affectation:

Richter says, in the Island of Sumatra there is a kind of "Light-chafers," large Fire-flies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night.

Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the Fire-flies! But—!

There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look out from all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is!

God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim that one man makes upon another.

that every created man, as Novalis said, is a "revelation in the Flesh." They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful courtesies which make life noble!

Courtesy is not a falsehood or grimace; it need not be such.

And Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still possible; nay still inevitable.

in those days when Hero-worship was the most incredible thing to every one, how it does come out nevertheless, and assert itself practically, in a way which all have to credit.

Divine right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might withal!

While old false Formulas are getting trampled everywhere into destruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves indestructible. In rebellious ages, when Kingship itself seems dead and abolished, Cromwell, Napoleon step forth again as Kings.

The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all.

Given the living man, there will be found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes.

But the suit-of-clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man—! We cannot "fight the French" by three hundred thousand red uniforms; there must be men in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from Reality.

No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living man, there will be found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man—!

We cannot "fight the French" by three hundred thousand red uniforms; there must be men in the inside of them!

Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do,—why then there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie!

That, after all, is the sort of man for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smooth-shaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much.

Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on!

Neither, on the whole, does this constitutional tolerance of the Eighteenth century for the other happier Puritans seem to be a very great matter. One might say, it is but a piece of Formulism and Scepticism, like the rest.

… mountains of calumny this man has been subject to, after being represented as the very prince of liars, who never, or hardly ever, spoke truth, but always some cunning counterfeit of truth, there should not yet have been one falsehood brought clearly home to him?

A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him.

Not one that I could yet get sight of. It is like Pococke asking Grotius, Where is your proof of Mahomet's Pigeon? No proof!—Let us leave all these calumnious chimeras, as chimeras ought to be left. They are not portraits of the man;

"Know the men that are to be trusted:" alas, this is yet, in these days, very far from us. The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Not a Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of Valets;—the Hero comes almost in vain to it otherwise!

Yes, it is far from us: but it must come; thank God, it is visibly coming. Till it do come, what have we?

"Know the men that are to be trusted:" alas, this is yet, in these days, very far from us.

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

Not a Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of Valets;—the Hero comes almost in vain to it otherwise! Yes, it is far from us: but it must come; thank God, it is visibly coming.

We shall either learn to know a Hero, a true Governor and Captain, somewhat better, when we see him; or else go on to be forever governed by the Unheroic;—had we ballot-boxes clattering at every street-corner, there were no remedy in these.

Poor Cromwell,—great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who could not speak.

Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange, among the elegant Euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendons! Consider him.

The depth and tenderness of his wild affections: the quantity of sympathy he had with things,—the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things: this was his hypochondria.

The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came of his greatness.

Samuel Johnson too is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful black enveloping him,—wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing, and struggling to see.

This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing.

Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining.

Virtue, Virtues, manhood, herohood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Germans well name it, Tugend (Taugend, dow-ing or Dough-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to do. This basis of the matter Cromwell had in him.

Such a man must have reticences in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, his journey will not extend far!

There is no use for any man's taking up his abode in a house built of glass.

A man always is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries made:

Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality, conventionality; to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths!

"I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only my little finger."

And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all departments of practice! He that cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call it "dissimulation," all this?

I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness.

Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him.

In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.

To call such a man "ambitious," to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses.

Leave me alone, leave me alone; there is too much of life in me already!

" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. "Corsica Boswell" flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat; but the great old Samuel stayed at home.

The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of!

They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way.

Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence:

The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way.

Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest.

Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak. Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great;

Ah yes, I will say again: The great silent men!

Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence.

The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way.

They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest.

Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak.

Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.—I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence.

Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;—which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak.

Silence, the great Empire of Silence: higher than the stars; deeper than the Kingdoms of Death! It alone is great; all else is small.

—I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do without standing on barrel-heads, to spout, and be seen of all the market-place, cultivate speech exclusively,—become a most green forest without roots!

to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man.

The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for.

It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels.—We will say therefore:

We will not assert that Cromwell was an immaculate man; that he fell into no faults, no insincerities among the rest. He was no dilettante professor of "perfections," "immaculate conducts."

He was a rugged Orson, rending his rough way through actual true work,—doubtless with many a fall therein.

Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily and hourly: it was too well known to him; known to God and him! The Sun was dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself grown a Dimness.

He was a rugged Orson, rending his rough way through actual true work,—doubtless with many a fall therein. Insincerities, faults, very many faults daily and hourly: it was too well known to him; known to God and him!

The Sun was dimmed many a time; but the Sun had not himself grown a Dimness.

Cromwell's last words, as he lay waiting for death, are those of a Christian heroic man. Broken prayers to God, that He would judge him and this Cause, He since man could not, in justice yet in pity. They are most touching words.

This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite is Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since,—to Mahomet and many others. Think of it seriously, you will find something in it; not much, not all, very far from all.

Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this miserable manner.

The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness! I will venture to say that such never befell a great deep Cromwell; I think, never.

This of the Fanatic-Hypocrite is Hume's theory of it; extensively applied since,—to Mahomet and many others. Think of it seriously, you will find something in it; not much, not all, very far from all. Sincere hero hearts do not sink in this miserable manner.

The Sun flings forth impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots; but it does not quench itself, and become no Sun at all, but a mass of Darkness!

I will venture to say that such never befell a great deep Cromwell; I think, never. Nature's own lionhearted Son; Antaeus-like, his strength is got by touching the Earth, his Mother;

One man; but he was a man; a million zealous men, but without the one; they against him were powerless! Perhaps of all the persons in that Puritan struggle, from first to last, the single indispensable one was verily Cromwell.

To see and dare, and decide; to be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty;—a King among them, whether they called him so or not.

Montrose, the noblest of all the Cavaliers; an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may call the Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on the one hand subjects without a King; on the other a King without subjects!

The subjects without King can do nothing; the subjectless King can do something.

This Montrose, with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so much as guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies like a wild whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time, some five times over, from the field before him.

interrupted them in that rapid speed of their Reform Bill;—ordered them to begone, and talk there no more.—Can we not forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Milton, who looked on it all near at hand, could applaud him.

The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it.

I fancy, most men who were realities in England might see into the necessity of that.

Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere helpless man; not used to speak the great inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather!

A helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning.

He talks much about "births of Providence:" All these changes, so many victories and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of me or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them so!

"heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories and crotchets; these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against the best-conditioned of Kings! Try if you can find that true.

Scepticism writing about Belief may have great gifts; but it is really ultra vires there. It is Blindness laying down the Laws of Optics.

—

Peace to him. Did he not, in spite of all, accomplish much for us?

We walk smoothly over his great rough heroic life; step over his body sunk in the ditch there. We need not spurn it, as we step on it!

—Let the Hero rest. It was not to men's judgment that he appealed; nor have men judged him very well.

We call our English Puritanism the second act: "Well then, the Bible is true; let us go by the Bible!" "In Church," said Luther; "In Church and State," said Cromwell, "let us go by what actually is God's Truth."

Men have to return to reality; they cannot live on semblance.

The French Revolution, or third act, we may well call the final one; for lower than that savage Sansculottism men cannot go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all seasons and circumstances;

"False as a bulletin" became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses.

A man in no case has liberty to tell lies.

It had been, in the long-run, better for Napoleon too if he had not told any.

The lies are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The old cry of wolf!—

A Lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labor into the bargain.

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity.

In St. Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no result in it; it comes to nothing that one can do.

Say nothing, if one can do nothing!

" He speaks often so, to his poor discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent strength in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.

He has an instinct of Nature better than his culture was. His savans, Bourrienne tells us, in that voyage to Egypt were one evening busily occupied arguing that there could be no God. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all manner of logic.

Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: but who made all that?"

The Atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face: "Who made all that?" So too in Practice:

They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all manner of logic. Napoleon looking up into the stars, answers, "Very ingenious, Messieurs: but who made all that?"

The Atheistic logic runs off from him like water; the great Fact stares him in the face: "Who made all that?"

So too in Practice: he, as every man that can be great, or have victory in this world, sees, through all entanglements, the practical heart of the matter; drives straight towards that.