refuge in the saddle and the prairie with the dragoon. What battle-piece
is so pathetic as Browning's "Grammarian's Funeral"? Do not waste your
gymnastics on the West Point or Annapolis student, whose whole life will
be one of active exercise, but bring them into the professional schools
and the counting-rooms. Whatever may be the exceptional cases, the stern
truth remains, that the great deeds of the world can be more easily done
by illiterate men than by sickly ones. Wisely said Horace Mann, "All
through the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is
lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble
enterprises perished, for lack of physical vigor to embody them in
deeds." And yet more eloquently it has been said by a younger American
thinker, (D.A. Wasson,) "Intellect in a weak body is like gold in
a spent swimmer's pocket,--the richer he would be, under other
circumstances, by so much the greater his danger now."

Of course, the mind has immense control over physical endurance, and
every one knows that among soldiers, sailors, emigrants, and woodsmen,
the leaders, though more delicately nurtured, will often endure hardship
better than the followers,--"because," says Sir Philip Sidney, "they are
supported by the great appetites of honor." But for all these triumphs
of nervous power a reaction lies in store, as in the case of the
superhuman efforts often made by delicate women. And besides, there is
a point beyond which no mental heroism can ignore the body,--as, for
instance, in seasickness and toothache. Can virtue arrest consumption,
or self-devotion set free the agonized breath of asthma, or heroic
energy defy paralysis? More formidable still are those subtle results
of disease, which cannot be resisted, because their source is unseen.
Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the
good or bad digestion of a prime-minister; and Motley holds that the
gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world.

But so blinded, on these matters, is our accustomed mode of thought,
that Mr. Beecher's recent lecture on the Laws of Nature has been met
with strong objections from a portion of the religious press. These
newspapers agree in asserting that admiration of physical strength
belonged to the barbarous ages of the world. So it certainly did, and so
much the better for those ages. They had that one merit, at least; and
so surely as an exclusively intellectual civiliza