n them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body unputrefied.
And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what
ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness;
will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said
ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree
divine!--Oh, if you could dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a
Spirit-god in his place! One way or other, he must and will have to be
dethroned.

Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with steel
murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than Working, take it
how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in religious Abbot Samson's days,
see what a Feudalism there had grown,--a 'glorious Chivalry,' much
besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the 'impossiblest'
things? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with
clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another's flesh;
converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into
nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did
a Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not hideous,
scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth considering by and
by.

I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the Fighting
itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting without cause, but
more or less with cause. Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best
of all definable as a born soldier; his life 'a battle and a march,'
under the right General. It is forever indispensable for a man to
fight: now with Necessity, with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles,
Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton;--now also with the
hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in
the head of my poor fellow man; make him claim over me rights which
are not his. All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty
conflict of strengths, each thinking itself the strongest, or, in
other words, the justest;--of Mights which do in the long-run, and
forever will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In
conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off
into dust: this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true and
exact.

And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful
operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comport himself, and
an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian. Victory is the a