feel a brotherhood with the
great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and
exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of
solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with a
bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of
execration, and the vision of violent death.

17. Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man,
we say, are historically somewhat better in this country, and at this
hour, than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It
will not now run against an ax at the first step out of the beaten
track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try
his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the
trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the
brave Lovejoy[365] gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the
rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to
live.

18. I see not any road to perfect peace which a man can walk, but to
take counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let
him go home much, and establish himself in those courses he approves.
The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure
duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with
honor, if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever
outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily
in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion.
Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the youth may
freely bring home to his mind, and with what sweetness of temper he
can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such
penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a sufficient
number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions incendiary.

19. It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible
heart to see how quick a bound nature has set to the utmost infliction
of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow
us.

"Let them rave:[366]
Thou art quiet in thy grave."

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we
are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy them who have seen
safely to an end their manful en