eating the dust in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes
to the heavens, to the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal
nobleness which was before all time, and shall be still when time has
passed away. But to lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help
me? Who will quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will
give me life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I did _not_ inherit
from the primaeval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for ever trying to
stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could so easily become--a
cunninger and more dainty-featured brute? Death itself, which seems at
times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me up and deliver me
from the burden of this animal and mortal body:

'Tis life, not death for which I pant;
'Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.

Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and brain,
which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses. I am a man--thou
art a man or woman--not because we have a flesh--God forbid! but because
there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray, which nature did not
give, and which nature cannot take away. And therefore, while I live on
earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be,
indeed, a _man_; and this same gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me,
shall be the very element in me which I will renounce, defy, despise; at
least, if I am minded to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly
higher civilised man. Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth,
more finery, more self-indulgence--even more aesthetic and artistic
luxury; but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I
earn scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or
the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of
the Thebaid, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed
on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and
fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit,
and not the Caesar, is the civilised man.

There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of
civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you
how the primeval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised
man. For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I
attach very little value to any of the