ith predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to
the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated
dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with
hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a
thing to set children screaming; and yet, looked at nearlier, known as his
fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for
so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so
incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely
descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who
should have blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny, and a
being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with
imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often
touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of
right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle
for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with
cordial affection; bringing forth in pain; rearing, with long-suffering
solicitude, his young.

To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to
the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing
to himself, to his neighbor, to his God; an ideal of decency, to which he
would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be
possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity;
here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the
other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their
degrees, it is a bosom thought. Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs
and cats whom we know fairly well; and doubtless some similar point of
honor sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so
little. But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that
merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish; that appetites
are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest
shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all
but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of