and
comes from incapacity to generate change or contribute toward personal
growth; and it follows that those whose nature is such can as little
prevent or retard any change that has its initiative beyond them. The
men who impress the world as the mightiest are those often who _can_ the
least--never those who can the most in their natural kingdom; generally
those whose frontiers lie openest to the inroads of temptation, whose
atmosphere is most subject to moody changes and passionate convulsions,
who, while perhaps they can whisper laws to a hemisphere, can utter no
decree of smallest potency as to how things shall be within themselves.
Place Alexander ille Magnus beside Malcolm's friend Epictetus, ille
servorum servus--take his crutch from the slave and set the hero upon
his Bucephalus, but set them alone and in a desert--which will prove the
great man? which the unchangeable? The question being what the man
himself shall or shall not be, shall or shall not feel, shall or shall
not recognize as of himself and troubling the motions of his being,
Alexander will prove a mere earth-bubble, Epictetus a cavern in which
pulses the tide of the eternal and infinite Sea.

But then first, when the false strength of the self-imagined great man
is gone, when the want or the sickness has weakened the self-assertion
which is so often mistaken for strength of individuality, when the
occupations in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness of
being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow and his
consolations their color, when suffering has wasted away those upper
strata of his factitious consciousness, and laid bare the lower,
simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten the
existence, then there is a hope of his commencing a new and real life.
Powers then, even powers within himself, of which he knew nothing, begin
to assert themselves, and the man commonly reported to possess a strong
will is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. This
factor, this man of business, this despiser of humbug, to whom the
scruples of a sensitive conscience were a contempt, would now lie awake
in the night and weep. "Ah!" I hear it answered, "but that was the
weakness caused by his illness." True; but what then had become of his
strength? And was it all weakness? What if this weakness was itself a
sign of returning life, not of advancing death--of the dawn of a new and
genuine strength? For he wep