h the progress of mere scientific
knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world
vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving
wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with
the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see
our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character
of Poet; a character which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure
belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is
produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce;--and will
produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in
no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.

Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times and
places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in
them, according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves!
We might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark
again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the
different _sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction;
that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will,
according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess,
I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts of
men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas,
would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic
warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy
there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator,
Philosopher;--in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is
all these. So too I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great
glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears
that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems,
touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education
led him thitherward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great
Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in him which are like
Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical
men withal; the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and
geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great heart, the clear
deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province
soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did
diplomatic messages, it seems, quite well: one