wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of
the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness,
and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We already know
whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will
have none! The Heaviest will reach the centre. The Heaviest,
sinking through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its
deflexions, its obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its
reboundings; whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating,
"See, your Heaviest ascends!"--but at all moments it is moving
centreward, fast as is convenient for it; sinking, sinking; and,
by laws older than the World, old as the Maker's first Plan of
the World, it has to arrive there.

Await the issue. In all battles, if you await the issue, each
fighter has prospered according to his right. His right and his
might, at the close of the account, were one and the same. He
has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his
right he has prevailed. His very death is no victory over him.
He dies indeed; but his work lives, very truly lives. A heroic
Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his
Scotland become, one day, a part of England: but he does hinder
that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it;
commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and
Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of
brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of
slave and master. If the union with England be in fact one of
Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was
not the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland: no, because brave
men rose there, and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like
slaves; and ye shall not,--and cannot!" Fight on, thou brave