;
struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's
sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men!
Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A
_great_ man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a
hospital, than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his
way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him,
wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the
_emptiness_ of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in
himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In
good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had
health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much
tormented in this way.

Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be "noticed" by noisy crowds
of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already
there; no notice would make _him_ other than he already was. Till his
hair was grown gray; and Life from the down-hill slope was all seen to
be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter _how_
it went,--he had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible.
He in his old days could not support it any longer, without selling
himself to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall,
and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, "Decide this,
decide that," which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly
decide! What could gilt carriages do for this man? From of old, was
there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendor as
of Heaven itself? His existence there as man set him beyond the need
of gilding. Death, Judgment and Eternity: these already lay as the
background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as
in a sea of nameless Thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could name.
God's Word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it: this was
great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man "ambitious,"
to figure him as the prurient wind-bag described above, seems to me the
poorest solecism. Such a man will say: "Keep your gilt carriages and
huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your
important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone; there is _too
much of life_ in me already!" Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in
England in his day, was not ambitious. "Corsica