l idea, toward which all the others,
if they tend any whither, must tend. Unhappily, it was only in the
military province that Napoleon could realize this idea of his, being
forced to fight for himself the while; before he got it tried to any
extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew
light, (no head can stand more than its quantity,) and he lost head, as
they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out,
leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by
others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea;
or, in Ram-Dass' phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up the miseries
of men.

Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau, with fire-words (of public speaking) and fire
whirlwinds (of cannon and musketry,) which for a season darkened the air,
are perhaps at bottom but superficial phenomena.

Napoleon was the 'armed soldier of democracy,' invincible while he
continued true to that. . . . He does by no means seem to me so great a
man as Cromwell. His enormous victories, which reached over all Europe,
while Cromwell abode mainly in our little England, are but as high
_stilts_ on which the man is seen standing; the stature of the man is not
altered thereby. I find in him no such sincerity as in Cromwell; only a
far inferior sort. No silent walking, through long years, with the Awful,
Unnameable, of this universe; 'walking with God' as he called it; and
faith and strength in that alone: _latent_ thought and valor, content to
lie latent, then burst out as in a blaze of heaven's lightning! Napoleon
lived in an age when God was no longer believed; the meaning of all
Silence, Latency, was thought to be Nonentity: he had to begin not out of
the Puritan Bible, but out of poor, sceptical encyclopedias. This was the
length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt,
every way articulate character, is in itself perhaps small compared with
our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of 'dumb prophet
struggling to speak,' we have a portentious mixture of the Quack! Hume's
notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply
much better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like,
where indeed, taken strictly, it has hardly any truth at all. An element
of blameable ambition shows itself from the first in this man; gets the
victory over him at last, and involves him and his work in ruin.

'Fals