hou, heroic soul, present thy account of
earnings. Human banks and labour-banks know thee not; or know
thee after generations and centuries have passed away, and thou
art clean gone from 'rewarding,'--all manner of bank-drafts,
shoptills, and Downing-street Exchequers lying very invisible, so
far from thee! Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward? Was
it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things for thy
heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call
'happy,' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee
deliberately, No. The whole spiritual secret of the new epoch
lies in this, that thou canst answer for thyself, with thy whole
clearness of head and heart, deliberately, No.

My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away. Give it, I
advise thee;--thou dost not expect to _sell_ thy Life in an
adequate manner? What price, for example, would content thee?
The just price of thy LIFE to thee,--why, God's entire Creation
to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of
Time, and what they hold: that is the price which would content
thee; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that!
It is thy all; and for it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an
unreasonable mortal;--or rather thou art a poor _infinite_
mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, _seemest_ so
unreasonable! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy
Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart;
let the price be Nothing: thou _hast_ then, in a certain sense,
got All for it! The heroic man,--and is not every man, God be
thanked, a potential hero?--has to do so, in all times and
circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic,
he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his
little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an
age when so much was unmelodious: "By Heaven, they shall either
be invaluable or of no value; I do not need your guineas for
them!" It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply
into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be
'satisfactoy' otherwise; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they
never can! Money for my little piece of work 'to the extent that
will allow me to keep working;' yes, this,--unless you mean that
I shall go my ways _before_ the work is all taken out of me: but
as to 'wages'--!--

On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks,
_Laborare