to "advance in life,"--in life itself--not in the trappings of it. My
friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, when the head of a
house died? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his
chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses; and each of them
placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence?
Suppose it were offered to you, in plain words, as it is offered to you
in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian honor, gradually,
while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this: You
shall die slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify,
your heart beat at last only as a rusted group of iron valves. Your
life shall fade from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of
Caina; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more gaily, and set
in higher chariots, and have more orders on its breast--crowns on its
head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it,
crowd after it up and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast
with it at their tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay
enough within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the
golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the
skull;--no more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the
death-angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet
practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure;
many of us grasp at it in its fullness of horror. Every man accepts
it, who desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who
means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more
fortune, and more public honor, and--not more personal soul. He only
is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood
warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living
peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or
kings of the earth--they, and they only. All other kingships, so far
as they are true, are only the practical issue and expression of
theirs; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties,--costly
shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel,--but still
only the toys of nations; or else, they are no royalties at all, but
tyrannies, or the mere active and practical issue of national folly;
for which reason I have said of them elsewhere, "Visible governments
are the toys of some nations, the diseases of ot