lived there, then Ligurians and Spaniards,
then some Roman colonists, whom the aridity and thorniness of the rock
had not kept away.

"Varro thought that nature, Brutus that the consciousness of virtue,
were sufficient consolations for any exile. How little have I lost in
comparison with those two fairest possessions which I shall everywhere
enjoy--nature and my own integrity! Whoever or whatever made the
world--whether it were a deity, or disembodied reason, or a divine
interfusing spirit, or destiny, or an immutable series of connected
causes--the result was that nothing, except our very meanest
possessions, should depend on the will of another. Man's best gifts lie
beyond the power of man either to give or to take away. This Universe,
the grandest and loveliest work of nature, and the Intellect which was
created to observe and to admire it, are our special and eternal
possessions, which shall last as long as we last ourselves. Cheerful,
therefore, and erect, let us hasten with undaunted footsteps
whithersoever our fortunes lead us.

"There is no land where man cannot dwell,--no land where he cannot
uplift his eyes to heaven; wherever we are, the distance of the divine
from the human remains the same. So then, as long as my eyes are not
robbed of that spectacle with which they cannot be satiated, so long as
I may look upon the sun and moon, and fix my lingering gaze on the other
constellations, and consider their rising and setting and the spaces
between them and the causes of their less and greater speed,--while I
may contemplate the multitude of stars glittering throughout the heaven,
some stationary, some revolving, some suddenly blazing forth, others
dazzling the gaze with a flood of fire as though they fell, and others
leaving over a long space their trails of light; while I am in the midst
of such phenomena, and mingle myself, as far as a man may, with things
celestial,--while my soul is ever occupied in contemplations so sublime
as these, what matters it what ground I tread?

"What though fortune has thrown me where the most magnificent abode is
but a cottage? the humblest cottage, if it be but the home of virtue,
may be more beautiful than all temples; no place is narrow which can
contain the crowd of glorious virtues; no exile severe into which you
may go with such a reliance. When Brutus left Marcellus at Mitylene, he
seemed to be himself going into exile because he left that illustrious
exile behind him.