flashes. If there is no brilliancy under the lids,
there is no thought in the brain, no love in the heart. Those who love
desire, and those who desire sparkle and flash. Determination gives a
fire to the glance, a magnificent fire that consumes all timid thoughts.

It is the self-willed ones who are sublime. He who is only brave, has
but a passing fit, he who is only valiant has temperament and nothing
more, he who is courageous has but one virtue. He who persists in the
truth is the grand character. The secret of great hearts may be summed
up in the word: Perseverando. Perseverance is to courage what the wheel
is to the lever; it is the continual renewing of the centre of support.
Let the desired goal be on earth or in heaven, only make for the goal.
Everything is in that; in the first case one is a Columbus, in the
second a god. Not to allow conscience to argue or the will to fail--this
is the way to suffering and glory. In the world of ethics to fall does
not exclude the possibility of soaring, rather does it give impetus to
flight. The mediocrities allow themselves to be dissuaded by the
specious obstacles--the great ones never. To perish is their perhaps, to
conquer their conviction. You may propose many good reasons to the
martyr why he should not allow himself to be stoned to death. Disdain of
every reasonable objection begets that sublime victory of the vanquished
which we call martyrdom.

All his efforts seemed to tend to the impossible. His success was
trifling and slow. He was compelled to expend much labour for very
little results. This it was that gave to his struggle its noble and
pathetic character.

That it should have required so many preparations, so much toil, so many
cautious experiments, such nights of hardship, and such days of danger,
merely to set up four beams over a shipwrecked vessel, to divide and
isolate the portion that could be saved, and to adjust to that wreck
within a wreck four tackle-blocks with their cables was only the result
of his solitary labour. Fate had decreed him the work, and necessity
obliged him to carry it out.

That solitary position Gilliatt had more than accepted; he had
deliberately chosen it. Dreading a competitor, because a competitor
might have proved a rival, he had sought for no assistance. The
overwhelming enterprise, the risk, the danger, the toil multiplied by
itself, the possible destruction of the salvor in his work, famine,
fever, nakedness, distress--h