said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest
navigators." So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven.
When a noble act is done,--perchance in a scene of great natural
beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one
day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them
once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried,
in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his
side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are
not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty
of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of
America;--before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all
their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the
Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living
picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her
palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal
in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was
dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the
champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him,
"You never sate on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the
citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an
open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to
the scaffold. "But," his biographer says, "the multitude imagined
they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side." In private places,
among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to
draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature
stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of
equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose
and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the
decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal
scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in
unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible
sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly
in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The
visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common
life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy
genius, will have remarked how easily he took all things along with
him,--the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became
ancillary to a m