presence? Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it IS
offered to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian
honour, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose
the offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood shall daily
grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a
rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and
sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, your
body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and
have more orders on its breast--crowns on its head, if you will.
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up
and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at their
tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough within
it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on
its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull;--no
more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel?
Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and
verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us
grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who
desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who means
only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more
fortune, and more public honour, and--NOT more personal soul. He
only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose
blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into
Living {22} peace. And the men who have this life in them are the
true lords or kings of the earth--they, and they only. All other
kingships, so far as they are true, are only the practical issue and
expression of theirs; if less than this, they are either dramatic
royalties,--costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels, instead
of tinsel--but still only the toys of nations; or else they are no
royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practical