rather, is not his desire to pay money,
to pay anything in reason, for the sake of excellence in his art? And,
indeed, what is worthier than Worth? What fitter, therefore, to be
paid for? And that payment is made, even under penal forms, every one
may see. For what did Raleigh give his lofty head? For the privilege
of being Raleigh, of being a man of great heart and a statesman of
great mind, with a King James, a burlesque of all sovereignty, on the
throne. For what did Socrates quaff the poison? For the privilege of
that divine sincerity and penetration which characterized his life.
For what did Kepler endure the last straits of poverty, his children
crying for bread, while his own heart was pierced with their wailing?
For the privilege--in his own noble words--"of reading God's thoughts
after Him,"--God's thoughts written in stellar signs on the scroll of
the skies. And Cicero and Thomas Cromwell, John Huss and John Knox,
John Rogers and John Brown, and many another, high and low, famed and
forgotten, must they not all make, as it were, penal payment for the
privilege of being true men, truest among true? And again I say, that,
if one knows something worthier than Worth, something more excellent
than Excellence, then only does he know something fitter than they to
be paid for.

Payment _may_ assume a penal form: do not think this its only form.
And to take the law at once out of the limitations which these
examples suggest, let me show you that it is a law of healthy and
unlamenting Nature. Look at the scale of existence, and you will see
that for every step of advance in that scale payment is required.
The animal is higher than the vegetable; the animal, accordingly, is
subject to the sense of pain, the vegetable not; and among animals the
pain may be keener as the organization is nobler. The susceptibility
not only to pain, but to vital injury, observes the same gradation.
A little girdling kills an oak; but some low fungus may be cut and
troubled and trampled _ad libitum_, and it will not perish; and along
the shores, farmers year after year pluck sea-weed from the rocks,
and year after year it springs again lively as ever. Among the lowest
orders of animals you shall find a creature that, if you cut it in
two, straightway duplicates its existence and floats away twice as
happy as before; but of the prick of a bodkin or the sting of a bee
the noblest of men may die.

In the animal body the organs make a draft fr