everence,
which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller
proportion and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and
estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is
partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these
rude shores, having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank
behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong
in him, bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on
long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience; on
endowments of that grave and weighty order which give the idea of
permanence and come under the general definition of respectability.
These primitive statesmen, therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley,
Bellingham, and their compeers,--who were elevated to power by the
early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but
distinguished by a ponderous sobriety rather than activity of intellect.
They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril
stood up for the welfare of the State like a line of cliffs against a
tempestuous tide.'[61]

The power of the will, however, even when it exists in great strength,
is often curiously capricious. History is full of examples of men who in
great trials and emergencies have acted with admirable and persevering
heroism, yet who readily succumbed to private vices or passions. The
will is not the same as the desires, but the connection between them is
very close. A love for a distant end; a dominating ambition or passion,
will call forth long perseverance in wholly distasteful work in men
whose will in other fields of life is lamentably feeble. Every one who
has embarked with real earnestness in some extended literary enterprise
which as a whole represents the genuine bent of his talent and character
will be struck with his exceptional power of traversing perseveringly
long sections of this enterprise for which he has no natural aptitude
and in which he takes no pleasure. Military courage is with most men
chiefly a matter of temperament and impulse, but there have been
conspicuous instances of great soldiers and sailors who have frankly
acknowledged that they never lost in battle an intense constitutional
shrinking from danger, though by the force of a strong will they never
suffered this timidity to govern or to weaken them. With men of very
vivid imagination there is a natural tendency to timidi