without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades,
and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to
particular men and things. Human life, as containing
this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason; all express more or less
distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable
essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great
spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to
it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations.
The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education,
for justice, for charity; the foundation of friendship
and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to
acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily
we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the
poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,
--in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs
of will or of genius,--anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make
us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but
rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel
most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder
slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in
the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great
prosperities of men;--because there law was enacted, the
sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was
struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have
done or applauded.