nds of the human spirit. The heart that serves in this cause,
if it languish, must languish from its own constitutional weakness; and
not through want of nourishment from without. But it is a belief
propagated in books, and which passes currently among talking men as
part of their familiar wisdom, that the hearts of the many _are_
constitutionally weak; that they _do_ languish; and are slow to answer
to the requisitions of things. I entreat those, who are in this
delusion, to look behind them and about them for the evidence of
experience. Now this, rightly understood, not only gives no support to
any such belief; but proves that the truth is in direct opposition to
it. The history of all ages; tumults after tumults; wars, foreign or
civil, with short or with no breathing-spaces, from generation to
generation; wars--why and wherefore? yet with courage, with
perseverance, with self-sacrifice, with enthusiasm--with cruelty driving
forward the cruel man from its own terrible nakedness, and attracting
the more benign by the accompaniment of some shadow which seems to
sanctify it; the senseless weaving and interweaving of
factions--vanishing and reviving and piercing each other like the
Northern Lights; public commotions, and those in the bosom of the
individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject; the blast,
like the blast of the desart, which sweeps perennially through a
frightful solitude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester; the
slowly quickening but ever quickening descent of appetite down which the
Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the
ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the
life-distemper of ambition;--these inward existences, and the visible
and familiar occurrences of daily life in every town and village; the
patient curiosity and contagious acclamations of the multitude in the
streets of the city and within the walls of the theatre; a procession,
or a rural dance; a hunting, or a horse-race; a flood, or a fire;
rejoicing and ringing of bells for an unexpected gift of good fortune,
or the coming of a foolish heir to his estate;--these demonstrate
incontestibly that the passions of men (I mean, the soul of sensibility
in the heart of man)--in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests,
in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men or
thrust upon them--do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true
sorrow of humanity consis