"Violent passions and ardent feelings are seldom found united with
complete self-command; but when they are they form the strongest
possible character, for there is all the power of clear thought and cool
judgment impelled by the resistless energy of feeling. This combination
Washington possessed; for in his impetuosity there was no foolish
rashness, and in his passion no injustice. Besides, whatever violence
there might be within, the explosion seldom came to the surface, and
when it did it was arrested at once by the stern mandate of his will. He
never lost the mastery of himself in any emergency, and in 'ruling his
spirit' showed himself greater than in 'taking a city.'

"It is one of the astonishing things in his life that, amid the perfect
chaos of feeling into which he was thrown,--amid the distracted counsels
and still more distracted affairs that surrounded him,--he never once
lost the perfect equilibrium of his own mind. The contagion of fear and
doubt and despair could not touch him. He did not seem susceptible to
the common influences which affect men. His soul poised on its own
centre, reposed calmly there through all the storms that beat for seven
years on his noble breast. The ingratitude and folly of those who should
have been his allies, the insults of his foes, and the frowns of fortune
never provoked him into a rash act, or deluded him into a single error."

Horace Mann says that there must be a time when the vista of the future,
with all its possibilities of glory and of shame, first opens to the
vision of youth. Then is he summoned to make his choice between truth
and treachery; between honor and dishonor; between purity and
profligacy; between moral life and moral death. And as he doubts or
balances between the heavenward or hellward course; as he struggles to
rise or consents to fall; is there in all the universe of God a
spectacle of higher exultation or of deeper pathos? Within him are the
appetites of a brute and the attributes of an angel; and when these meet
in council to make up the roll of his destiny and seal his fate, shall
the beast hound out the seraph? Shall the young man, now conscious of
the largeness of his sphere and of the sovereignty of his choice, wed
the low ambitions of the world, and seek, with their emptiness, to fill
his immortal desires? Because he has a few animal wants that must be
supplied, shall he become all animal,--an epicure and an inebriate,--and
blasphemously m