firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he
is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present
thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful
serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do
is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe,
and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great
thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
Linnæus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it
from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and
Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with
serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
follow the moon.[71]

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light
that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are
spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a
millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two
approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in
the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and
are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its full stature. What a
testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of
his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in
the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their