lles, each man hath one vulnerable spot. No palace door is proof
against phantoms. Each prince's palace and peasant's cottage holds at
least one bond-slave. Byron, with his club-foot, counted himself a
prisoner pacing between the walls of his narrow dungeon. Keats,
struggling against his consumption, thought his career that of the
galley-slave. The mother, fastened for years to the couch of her
crippled child, is bound by cords invisible, indeed, but none the less
powerful. Nor is the bondage always physical. Here is the man who
made his way out of poverty and loneliness toward wealth and position,
yet maintained his integrity through all the fight, and stood in life's
evening time possessed of wealth, but in a moment saw it crash into
nothing and fell under bondage to poverty. And, here is some Henry
Grady, a prince among men, the leader of the new South, his thoughts
like roots drinking in the riches of the North; his speech like
branches dropping bounty over all the tropic states, seeming to be the
one indispensable man of his section, but who in the midst of his
career is smitten and, dying, left his pilgrim band in bondage.

Here is Sir William Napier writing, "I am now old and feeble and
miserable; my eyes are dim, very dim, with weeping for my lost child,"
and went on bound midst the thick shadows. Or here are the man and
woman, set each to each like perfect music unto noble words, and one is
taken--but Robert Browning was left to dwell in such sorrow that for a
time he could not see his pen for the thick darkness. Here is the
youth who by one sin fell out of man's regard, and struggling upward,
found it was a far cry back to the lost heights, and wrote the story of
his broken life in the song of "the bird with the broken pinion, that
never flew as high again." Sooner or later each life passes under
bondage. For all strength will vanish as the morning dew our joys take
wings and flit away; the eye dim, the ear dull, the thought decay, our
dearest die. Oft life's waves and billows chill us to the very marrow,
while we gasp and shiver midst the surging tide. Then it is a blessed
thing to look out through blinding tears upon a friendly face, to feel
the touch of a friendly hand and to know there are some who "remember
those in bonds, as bound with them."

Now this principle of social sympathy and liability gives us the secret
of all the epoch-making men of our time. Carlyle once called Ruskin
"the se