han to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives,
strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all
quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be
but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential
meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed. To be
a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation
from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the
great inspiring ideas of country and humanity. All the rest is spite,
and spleen; and cant, and conceit, and words.

It is plain, of course, that every man of large and living thought will
naturally sympathize with those great social movements, informing
and reforming, which are the glory of the age; but it must always be
remembered that the grand and generous sentiments that underlie those
movements demand in their fervid disciple a corresponding grandeur and
generosity of soul. There is no reason why his philanthropy should be
malignant because other men's conservatism may be stupid; and the vulgar
insensibility to the rights of the oppressed, and the vulgar scorn of
the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and
educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles,
should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the
narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is
righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which
Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example
and the sarcasm of her terrible silence.

In these remarks, which we trust our readers have at least been kind
enough to consider worthy of an effort of patience, we have attempted to
connect all genuine intellectual success with manliness of character;
have endeavored to show that force of individual being is its primary
condition; that this force is augmented and enriched, or weakened and
impoverished, according as it is or is not directed to appropriate
objects; that indolence, conceit, and fear present continual checks to
this going out of the mind into glad and invigorating communion with
facts and laws; and that as a man is not a mere bundle of faculties,
but a vital person, whose unity pervades, vivifies, and creates all
the varieties of his manifestation, the same vices which enfeeble and
deprave character tend to enfeeble and deprave intellect. But pe