all bosoms communicate, all hearts are one. Hector and Ajax, in Homer's
great picture, stand face to face, each with advanced foot, with
levelled spear, and turgid sinew, eager to kill, while on either side
ten thousand slaughterous wishes poise themselves in hot breasts,
waiting to fly with the flying weapons; yet, though the combatants
seem to surrender themselves wholly to this action, there is in each a
profound element that is no party to these hostilities. It is the pure
nature of man. Ajax is not all Greek, nor is Hector wholly Trojan: both
are also men; and to the extent of their mutual participation in this
pure and perpetual element of Manhood, they are more than friends,
more than relatives,--they are of identical spirit. For there is an
imperishable nature of Man, ever and everywhere the same, of which each
particular man is a testimony and representation. As the solid earth
underruns the "dissociating sea"--_Oceano dissociabili_--and joins in
one all sundered lands, so does this nature dip beneath the dividing
parts of our being, and make of all men one simple and inseparable
humanity. In love, in friendship, in true conversation, in all happiness
of communion between men, it is this unchangeable substratum or
substance of man's being that is efficient and supreme: out of
divers bosoms, Same calls, and replies to Same with a great joy
of self-recognition. It is only in virtue of this nature that men
understand, appreciate, admire, trust each other,--that books of the
earliest times remain true in the latest,--that society is possible; and
he in whom the virtue of it dwells divinely is admitted to the secret
confidence of all bosoms, lives in all times, and converses with each
soul and age in its own vernacular. Socrates looked beyond the gates of
death for happy communion with Homer and all the great; but already we
interchange words with these, whenever we are so sweetly prospered as to
become, in some good degree, identical with the absolute nature of man.