alysis, an emotion common
to us and the lower animals. And yet no man excludes it less than that
true hero, St. Paul. If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of
whom I spoke just now, knew that their memories would be wept over and
worshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would become
watchwords to children in their fatherland: what is that to us, save that
it should make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had that
thought with them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy,
and death more sweet?

And yet--and yet--is not the highest heroism that which is free even from
the approbation of our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the best
and wisest? The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in
secret? The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber? The Godlike
lives lived in obscurity?--a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce
in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women
of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would
only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, and
entreat to be left alone with God. True, they cannot always hide. They
must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the golden
lesson. But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect and
womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces, woman transcends
the man, that it would hide if it could.

And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the golden
deeds of woman in Miss Yonge's book--it was a pleasant thought to me,
that I could say to myself--Ah! yes. These heroines are known, and their
fame flies through the mouths of men. But if so, how many thousands of
heroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, of
whom we shall never know. But still they are there. They sow in secret
the seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not
that we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble ill-drest
woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance. She who nurses a
bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse. She who
spends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless brother,
on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend. She who--But why go on with the
long list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comes
in contact daily--and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of a