o do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling
out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in
pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the
heart of his mystery,[5] we find in him one thought, strange to the
point of lunacy: the thought of duty;[6] the thought of something
owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency,
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below
which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is
one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends
itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence;
but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought:--Not in man
alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and
doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster,
and the louse, of whom we know so little:--But in man, at least, it
sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come
second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are
conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the
reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most
cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having
strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace
death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted
practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life:
stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this
blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I
shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man
at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and
treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They
cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his
efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how
tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely
we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from
which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be
a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he
startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look,
under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what
depth of ignora