here want or weariness or stormy
sorrow have long since and often entered, and have again and again
seemed about to overwhelm, but where, after many years, faithful
souls, well known to many of you, are, despite fortune, still at their
post, with the light burning.

And now, I ask you, What is the spirit which rules such lives? It is a
spirit which is familiar in song and story; for men always love to
tell about it when they meet with impressive examples of its workings.
What I regret is that, when men repeat such songs and stories,
familiarity breeds, not indeed contempt (for our whole nature rejoices
to think of such deeds), but a certain tendency to false emphasis. We
notice the dramatic and heroic incidents of such lives, and are
charmed with the picturesque or with the thrilling features of the
tale. And so we seem to ourselves to be dealing mainly with anecdotes
and with accidents. We fail {193} sufficiently to consider that back
of the exceptional show of heroism there has to be the personal
character, itself the result of years of devotion and of training--
the character that has made itself ready for these dramatic but, after
all, not supremely significant opportunities. Only when we in mind run
over series of such cases do we see that we are dealing with a spirit
suited not only to great occasions, but to every moment of reasonable
life, and not only to any one or two callings, but to all sorts and
conditions of men.

The spirit in question is the one which is often well illustrated in
the lives of warriors who willingly face death for their flag--if only
they face death not merely as brutes may also face it (because their
fighting blood is aroused), but as reasonable men face death who
clearly see what conditions make it "man's perdition to be safe."
There are two tests by which we may know whether the warriors really
have the spirit of which I am speaking, namely, the spirit that was
also, and quite equally, present in the widow who, in all the agony of
a new grief, and through the storm that had taken away her husband,
still climbed the lonely stairway and trimmed the lamp which he could
never again tend. The first test that the warrior and the lighthouse
tender are moved by the same spirit is furnished by the fact that
those warriors who are rightly filled with this spirit are as well
able to live by it in peace as in war; are, for instance, able even to
surrender to {194} the foe, when fortune and duty