is sure to be named
coldness, as Mr. Ruskin recently remarks,--why vast wealth of good
pride, in its often meek acceptance of wrong, in its quiet ignoring
of insult, in its silent superiority to provocation, passes with
the superficial and petulant for poverty of pride and mere
mean-spiritedness,--why a courage which is not partial, but _total_,
coexisting, as it always does, with a noble peacefulness, with a noble
inaptness for frivolous hazards, and a noble slowness to take offence,
is, in its delays and forbearances, thought by the half-courageous to
be no better than cowardice;--it is, as we have said, because great
qualities revolve and repose in orbits of reciprocation with their
opposites, which opposites are by coarse and ungentle eyes misdeemed to
be contraries. Feeling transcendently deep and powerful is unimpassioned
and far lower-voiced than indifference and unfeelingness, being wont
to express itself, not by eloquent ebullition, but by extreme
understatement, or even by total silence. Sir Walter Raleigh, when at
length he found himself betrayed to death--and how basely betrayed!--by
Sir Lewis Stukely, only said, "Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn to
your credit." The New Testament tells us of a betrayal yet more quietly
received. These are instances of noble manners.

What actions are absolutely moral is determined by application of the
same law,--those only which repose wholly in themselves, being to
themselves at once motive and reward. "Miserable is he," says the
"Bhagavad Gita," "whose motive to action lies, not in the action itself,
but in its reward." Duty purchased with covenant of special delights is
not duty, but is the most pointed possible denial of it. The just man
looks not beyond justice; the merciful reposes in acts of mercy; and
he who would be bribed to equity and goodness is not only bad, but
shameless. But of this no further words.

Rest is sacred, celestial, and the appreciation of it and longing for
it are mingled with the religious sentiment of all nations. I cannot
remember the time when there was not to me a certain ineffable
suggestion in the apostolic words, "There remaineth, therefore, a rest
for the people of God." But the repose of the godlike must, as that of
God himself, be _infinitely_ removed from mere sluggish inactivity;
since the conception of action is the conception of existence
itself,--that is, of Being in the act of self-manifestation. Celestial
rest is found