ty-lamp in
the terrible pit,--what were the trophies of Miltiades to these? The
ancient Agamemnon faced no danger so memorable as that ocean-storm
which beset his modern namesake, bearing across the waters a more
priceless treasure than Helen, pride of Greece. And, indeed, setting
aside these sublimities of purpose, and looking simply at the
quantity and quality of peril, it is doubtful whether any tale of
the sea-kings thrills the blood more worthily than the plain
newspaper narrative of Captain Thomas Bailey, in the Newburyport
schooner, "Atlas," beating out of the Gut of Canso, in a gale of wind,
with his crew of two men and a boy, up to their waists in the water.

It is easy to test the matter. Let any one, who believes that the
day of daring is past, beg or buy a ride on the locomotive of the
earliest express-train, some cold winter-morning. One wave of the
conductor's hand, and the live engine springs snorting beneath you,
as no Arab steed ever rushed over the desert. It is not like being
bound to an arrow, for that motion would be smoother; it is not like
being hurled upon an ocean crest, for that would be slower. You are
rushing onward, and you are powerless; that is all. The frosty air
gives such a brittle and slippery look to the two iron lines which
lie between you and destruction, that you appreciate the Mohammedan
fable of the Bridge Herat, thinner than a hair, sharper than a
scimitar, which stretches over hell and leads to paradise. Nothing
has passed over that perilous track for many hours; the cliffs may
have fallen and buried it, the frail bridges may have sunk beneath it,
or diabolical malice put obstructions on it, no matter how trivial,
equally fatal to you; each curving embankment may hide unknown horrors,
from which, though all others escape, you, on the engine, cannot;
and yet, still the surging locomotive bounds onward, beneath your
mad career. You draw a long breath, as you dismount at last, a hundred
miles away, as if you had been riding with Mazeppa or Brunechilde,
and yet escaped alive. And there, by your side, stands the quiet,
grimy engineer, turning already to his tobacco and his newspaper,
and unconscious, while he reads of the charge at Balaklava, that
his life is Balaklava every day.

Physical courage is not, therefore, a thing to be so easily set aside.
Nor is it, as our reformers appear sometimes to assume, a mere
corollary from moral courage, and, ultimately, to be merged in that.