rudeness of
conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end
to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant
of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their
fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god.
Divinity and Prophet are past. We are now to see our Hero in the less
ambitious, but also less questionable, character of Poet; a character
which does not pass. The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages;
whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as
the oldest may produce;--and will produce, always when Nature pleases.
Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he
may be shaped into a Poet.

Hero, Prophet, Poet,--many different names, in different times, and
places, do we give to Great Men; according to varieties we note in them,
according to the sphere in which they have displayed themselves! We
might give many more names, on this same principle. I will remark again,
however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, that the different
_sphere_ constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero
can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the
kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion
of a truly great man that could not be _all_ sorts of men. The Poet who
could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make
a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he
himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the
Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher;--in one or the other
degree, he could have been, he is all these. So too I cannot understand
how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was
in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written
verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, had his
course of life and education led him thitherward. The grand fundamental
character is that of Great Man; that the man be great. Napoleon has
words in him which are like Austerlitz Battles. Louis Fourteenth's
Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal; the things Turenne says
are full of sagacity and geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The
great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever,
in what province soever, can prosper at all without these. Petrarch and
Boccaccio did diplomatic mes