distant?--it is pride! What, then, sustains a man in such a situation,
following his own conscience, with his eyes opened to all the perils
of the path? Away with the cant of public opinion,--away with the poor
delusion of posthumous justice; he will offend the first, he will never
obtain the last. What sustains him? HIS OWN SOUL! A man thoroughly great
has a certain contempt for his kind while he aids them: their weal or
woe are all; their applause--their blame--are nothing to him. He walks
forth from the circle of birth and habit; he is deaf to the little
motives of little men. High, through the widest space his orbit may
describe, he holds on his course to guide or to enlighten; but the
noises below reach him not! Until the wheel is broken,--until the dark
void swallow up the star,--it makes melody, night and day, to its own
ear: thirsting for no sound from the earth it illumines, anxious for no
companionship in the path through which it rolls, conscious of its own
glory, and contented, therefore, to be alone!

But minds of this order are rare. All ages cannot produce them. They
are exceptions to the ordinary and human virtue, which is influenced
and regulated by external circumstance. At a time when even to be merely
susceptible to the voice of fame was a great pre-eminence in moral
energies over the rest of mankind, it would be impossible that any
one should ever have formed the conception of that more refined and
metaphysical sentiment, that purer excitement to high deeds--that glory
in one's own heart, which is so immeasurably above the desire of a
renown that lackeys the heels of others. In fact, before we can
dispense with the world, we must, by a long and severe novitiate--by the
probation of much thought, and much sorrow--by deep and sad conviction
of the vanity of all that the world can give us, have raised our
selves--not in the fervour of an hour, but habitually--above the world:
an abstraction--an idealism--which, in our wiser age, how few even of