this; it
pervades the tenor of our daily life, runs in our heart's-blood, sits at
our hearths, wings our loftiest dreams of human exaltation. How, on this
earth, could we love, or revere, or emulate, if, in our contemplation of
the human being, we could not sunder the noble, the fair, the gracious,
the august, from the dregs of mortality, from the dust that hangs
perishably about him the imperishable? We judge in love, that in love we
may be judged. At our hearthsides, we gain more than we dared desire, by
mutual mercy; at our hearthsides, we bestow and receive a better love,
by this power of soft and magnanimous oblivion. We are ourselves the
gainers, when thus we honour the great dead. _They_ hear not--_they_
feel not, excepting by an illusion of our own moved imaginations, which
fill up chasms of awful, impassable separation; but _we_ hear--_we_
feel; and the echo of the acclaim which hills and skies have this day
repeated, we can carry home in our hearts, where it shall settle down
into the composure of love and pity, and admiration and gratitude, felt
to be due for ever to our great poet's shade.

In no other spirit could genius have ever dared, in elegies and hymns,
to seek to perpetuate at once a whole people's triumph, and a whole
people's grief, by celebration of king, sage, priest, or poet, gone to
his reward. From the natural infirmities of his meanest subject, what
King was ever free? Against the golden rim that rounds his mortal
temples come the same throbbings from blood in disease or passion
hurrying from heart to brain, as disturb the aching head of the poor
hind on his pallet of straw. But the king had been a guardian, a
restorer, a deliverer; therefore his sins are buried or burned with his
body; and all over the land he saved, generation after generation
continues to cry aloud--"O king, live for ever!" The Sage who, by long
meditation on man's nature and man's life, has seen how liberty rests on
law, rights on obligations, and that his passions must be fettered, that
his will be free--how often has he been overcome, when wrestling in
agony with the powers of evil, in that seclusion from all trouble in
which reverent admiration nevertheless believes that wisdom for ever
serenely dwells! The Servant of God, has he always kept his heart pure
from the world, nor ever held up in prayer other than spotless hands? A
humble confession of his own utter unworthiness would be his reply alike
to scoffer and to h