ctors? How dare I read Washington's
campaigns when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents?
Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a
pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is
peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,--

"He knew not what to say, and so he swore."

I may say it of our preposterous use of books,--He knew not what to do,
and so he read. I can think of nothing to fill my time with, and I find
the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to Brant,
or to General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time should be as
good as their time,--my facts, my net of relations, as good as theirs,
or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work so well that other idlers
if they choose may compare my texture with the texture of these and find
it identical with the best.

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this
under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an
identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet,
the good player. The poet uses the names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of
Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of
the Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer to the
nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet write
a true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of Caesar; then the
selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions
as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing,
dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that
is reckoned solid and precious in the world,--palaces, gardens, money,
navies, kingdoms,--marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it
casts on these gauds of men;--these all are his, and by the power of
these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names
and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service,
and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot
be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme
and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all
people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has
enshrined itself in some other form and done some other