Volume I Part 10 (1/2)

III.

G.o.d! thou art mighty!--at thy footstool bound, Lie gazing to thee Chance, and Life, and Death; Nor in the Angel-circle flaming round, Nor in the million worlds that blaze beneath Is one that can withstand thy wrath's hot breath-- Woe in thy frown--in thy smile, victory!

Hear my last prayer--I ask no mortal wreath; Let but these eyes my rescued country see, Then take my spirit, All-Omnipotent, to thee.

IV.

Now for the fight--now for the cannon-peal-- Forward--through blood and toil, and cloud and fire!

Glorious the shout, the shock, the crash of steel, The volley's roll, the rocket's blasting spire; They shake--like broken waves their squares retire,-- On, them, hussars!--now give them rein and heel; Think of the orphaned child, the murdered sire:-- Earth cries for blood--in thunder on them wheel!

This hour to Europe's fate shall set the triumph seal.

KARL THEODORE KORNER.

SELF-RELIANCE.

1. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what THEY thought.

2. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the l.u.s.tre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

3. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

4. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nouris.h.i.+ng corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. 5. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre- established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.

6. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but G.o.d will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

7. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

8. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be n.o.ble clay under the Almighty effort, let us advance on Chaos and the Dark.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.

1. Adams and Jefferson, I have said, are no more. As human beings, indeed, they are no more. They are no more, as in 1776, bold and fearless advocates of independence; no more, as on subsequent periods, the head of the government; no more, as we have recently seen them, aged and venerable objects of admiration and regard.

They are no more. They are dead.

2. But how little is there of the great and good which can die? To their country they yet live, and live forever. They live in all that perpetuates the remembrance of men on earth; in the recorded proofs of their own great actions, in the offspring of their intellect, in the deep engraved lines of public grat.i.tude, and in the respect and homage of mankind. They live in their example; and they live, emphatically, and will live, in the influence which their lives and efforts, their principles and opinions, now exercise, and will continue to exercise, on the affairs of men, not only in their own country, but throughout the civilized world.

3. A superior and commanding human intellect, a truly great man,-- when heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift,--is not a temporary flame, burning bright for awhile, and then expiring, giving place to returning darkness. It is rather a spark of fervent heat, as well as radiant light, with power to enkindle the common ma.s.s of human mind; so that, when it glimmers in its own decay, and finally goes out in death, no night follows; but it leaves the world all light, all on fire, from the potent contact of its own spirit.

4. Bacon died; but the human understanding, roused by the torch of his miraculous mind to a perception of the true philosophy and the just mode of inquiring after truth, has kept on its course successfully and gloriously. Newton died; yet the courses of the spheres are still known, and they yet move on, in the orbits which he saw and described for them, in the infinity of s.p.a.ce.

5. No two men now live--perhaps it may be doubted whether any two men have ever lived in one age,--who, more than those we now commemorate, have impressed their own sentiments, in regard to politics and government, on mankind; infused their own opinions more deeply into the opinions of others; or given a more lasting direction to the current of human thought. Their work doth not perish with them. The tree which they a.s.sisted to plant will flourish, although they water it and protect it no longer; for it has struck its roots deep; it has sent them to the very center; no storm, not of force to burst the orb, can overturn it; its branches spread wide; they stretch their protecting arms broader and broader, and its top is destined to reach the heavens.

6. We are not deceived. There is no delusion here. No age will come, in which the American Revolution will appear less than it is--one of the greatest events in human history. No age will come, in which in it will cease to be seen and felt, on either continent, that a mighty step, a great advance, not only in American affairs, but in human affairs, was made on the 4th of July, 1776. And no age will come, we trust, so ignorant, or so unjust, as not to see and acknowledge the efficient agency of these we now honor, in producing that momentous event.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

THE DEFENCE OF LUCKNOW.

I.

Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, hast thou Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle cry!