the image of possible excellence, and withheld from him who built up in
himself a transcendent character indestructible as the obligations of
Duty, and beautiful as her rewards?

Indeed, if by the genius of action you mean will enlightened by
intelligence, and intelligence energized by will,--if force and insight
be its characteristics, and influence its test,--and, especially, if
great effects suppose a cause proportionately great, that is, a vital
causative mind,--then is Washington most assuredly a man of genius, and
one whom no other American has equaled in the power of working morally
and mentally on other minds. His genius, it is true, was of a peculiar
kind, the genius of character, of thought, and the objects of thought
solidified and concentrated into active faculty. He belongs to that rare
class of men,--rare as Homers and Miltons, rare as Platos and Newtons,
who have impressed their characters upon nations without pampering
national vices. Such men have natures broad enough to include all the
facts of a people's practical life, and deep enough to discern the
spiritual laws which underlie, animate, and govern those facts.
Washington, in short, had that greatness of character which is the
highest expression and last result of greatness of mind; for there is no
method of building up character except through mind. Indeed, character
like his is not _built_ up, stone upon stone, precept upon precept, but
_grows_ up, through an actual contact of thought with things,--the
assimilative mind transmuting the impalpable but potent spirit of public
sentiment, and the life of visible facts, and the power of spiritual
laws, into individual life and power, so that their mighty energies put
on personality, as it were, and act through one centralizing human will.
This process may not, if you please, make the great philosopher or the
great poet; but it does make the great _man_,--the man in whom thought
and judgment seem identical with volition,--the man whose vital
expression is not in words, but deeds,--the man whose sublime ideas
issue necessarily in sublime acts, not in sublime art. It was because
Washington's character was thus composed of the inmost substance and
power of facts and principles, that men instinctively felt the perfect
reality of his comprehensive manhood. This reality enforced universal
respect, married strength to repose, and threw into his face that
commanding majesty which made men of the speculative auda