beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or
they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe
which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some
rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask
the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not
the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature
never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret
to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies,--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is
the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must
infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the
procession of famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence
we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new
possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these
flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an
elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch
by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot
be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power
of the greatest men,--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of
mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin,
and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears
intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other:
the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so
much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent