COURAGE AN ELEMENT OF MANLINESS. 39 of heart; strength to endure as well as resist; to pursue and achieve, as well as to attempt; to sacrifice self altogether, on behalf of any justified conviction, a thorough consent of judgment, conscience, imagination, affection, all vitalize 1 and active; and a certain invincible firmness of will-this is implied in a really abounding and masterful Courage. It is not impatient. It is not injurious. It is not the creature of fractious and vehement will-power in man. It is never allied with a passionate selfishness. It is associated with great convictions, has its roots in profound moral experiences; is nourished by thoughts of God and the hereafter. It forms the base of sympathies, generosities, rather than defiances. Its language is that of courtesy, always; never of petulance or of egotistic arrogance. A chivalric manner is natural to it, especially toward such as are weak or alarmed; as natural as is his carol to the song-bird, or its interplay of colors to flowering tulip. Such courage as this is everywhere at home, and is naturally master of all situations. Conspicuous on the battlefield, it may equally be shown in the journal, or in the pulpit. It shines on the platform as clearly as in the Senate; is as manifest in the frank and unswerving announcement of principles which men hate, in the face of their hatred, as it is when the tempestuous winds, tearing the wave-tops into snow drift, have caught the reeling ship in their clutch and threaten to bury it in the deep. And wherever it is shown, it has in it something of the morally superlative. We know how History delights to turn from eloquent debates or picturesque pageants to present even partial portraits of this; as in the English soldier biding the shock at Waterloo, wholly disdainful of the military science which declared him to be beaten, unshaken in his spirit and holding by that spirit his reeling standards to their perilous place, in spite of the tremendous, successive assaults of artillery and cavalry which Napoleon hurled upon his rent and shattered squares; in William of Nassau, with treachery around him, a price on his head, a few divided provinces at his back, crowded almost literally into the sea and clinging with hardly more than his finger-tips to the half-drowned land, yet fronting without one sense of fear or sign of hesitation the utmost fury and force of Spain, though the armaments of that exasperated empire were pushed to their relentless onset by the subtlety of Philip, the fierce energy of Alva, and the unwearied genius of Parma; in the Wittenberg monk going to the Diet with unfaltering step, though the veteran soldier told him as he passed that the pathway was more perilous than his own had been in the imminent deadly breach. Nothing else in biography or in history impresses us more than this sovereign courage; assured, unyielding, without impetuosity, but ready for any service or sacrifice. It has been not unfrequently the infrangible diamond-pivot on which destinies have turned. Whether or not connected with consequences so large and important, in its own majesty, it lifts prosaic and commonplace pages above the level of rhythmic ethics. It makes us aware of the vast possibilities infolded in our nature. It knits the man in whom it appears with whatever is freest and lordliest in the universe. RICHARD S. STORRS. THE BURIAL OF THE DANE. BLUE Gulf all around us, Blue sky overhead: It is but a Danish sailor, Grizzled with sun and storm. THE BURIAL OF THE DANE. His name, and the strand he hailed from, We know--and there's nothing more! But perhaps his mother is waiting On the lonely Island of Fohr. Still, as he lay there dying, Reason drifting awreck, ""Tis my watch," he would mutter, "I must go upon deck!" Ay, on deck-by the foremast!- The Union-Jack laid o'er him, How quiet he lies in the sun! Slow the ponderous engine, Stand in order, and listen To the holiest page of prayer! The soft trade-wind is lifting Our captain reads the service (A little spray on his cheeks), The grand old words of burial, And the trust a true heart seeks: "We therefore commit his body To the deep "—and, as he speaks, 41 How is the spirit of a free people to be formed, animated, and cheered, but out of the storehouse of its historic recollections? Are we to be forever talking of Marathon and Thermopylæ, and going back to read in obscure texts of Greek and Latin of the exemplars of virtue? We can find them nearer home, in our own, country, on our own soil. Strains of the noblest sentiment that ever swelled in the breast of man, are breathing to us out of every page of THE LADY OF CASTLENORE. 43 our country's history, in the native eloquence of our mother tongue. We are willing to pay our tribute of applause to the memory of Leonidas, who fell nobly for his country in the face of the foe. But when we trace him to his home, we are confounded at the reflection that that same Spartan heroism to which he sacrificed himself at Thermopyla, would have led him to tear his own child from the bosom of its mother, and give it to be eaten by wolves. We feel a glow of admiration at the heroism displayed at Marathon by the ten thousand champions of invaded Greece; but we cannot forget that a tenth part of the number were slaves unchained from the workshops and doorposts of their masters to go and fight the battles of freedom. I do not mean that these examples are to destroy the interest with which we read the history of ancient times. They possibly increase the interest by the very contrast they exhibit. But they warn us, if we need the warning, to seek our great practical lessons of patriotism at home, out of the exploits and sacrifices of which our own country is the theatre, out of the characters of our own fathers. Them we know, citizen-heroes. We know what happy firesides they left for the cheerless camp. We know with what pacific habits they dared the perils of the field. There is no mystery, no romance, no madness under the name of chivalry, about them. It is all resolute, manly resistance for the sake of conscience and of liberty. There were never such brown tresses, such a faultless hand: She had youth, and she had gold, she had jewels all untold, And many a lover bold wooed the Lady of the Land. |