schools but of the blood, shines in
every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of political
science or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the wise.
Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged
and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by our
predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The disease
and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual,
and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such
compound misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man's head back to his heels;
hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes; insanity that
makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain
ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have
its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who has not in
his own person become to some amount a stockholder in the sin, and so
made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him
hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither
defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life
in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by
the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.

Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes a
warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with the
infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we give
the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and
ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which
slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and
power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such
balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly and as
it were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms
and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not
philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not
to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is
the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly revere
it. T