world ordinarily seeks for or most applauds in its heroes. It is
apt to esteem that man most human who has his qualities in a
certain exaggeration, whose courage is passionate, whose
generosity is without deliberation, whose just action is without
premeditation, whose spirit runs toward its favorite objects with
an infectious and reckless ardor, whose wisdom is no child of
slow prudence. We love Achilles more than Diomedes, and Ulysses
not at all. But these are standards left over from a ruder state
of society: we should have passed by this time the Homeric stage
of mind--should have heroes suited to our age. Nay, we have
erected different standards, and do make a different choice, when
we see in any man fulfillment of our real ideals. Let a modern
instance serve as test. Could any man hesitate to say that
Abraham Lincoln was more human than William Lloyd Garrison? Does
not every one know that it was the practical Free-Soilers who made
emancipation possible, and not the hot, impracticable
Abolitionists; that the country was infinitely more moved by
Lincoln's temperate sagacity than by any man's enthusiasm,
instinctively trusted the man who saw the whole situation and kept
his balance, instinctively held off from those who refused to see
more than one thing? We know how serviceable the intense and
headlong agitator was in bringing to their feet men fit for
action; but we feel uneasy while he lives, and vouchsafe him our
full sympathy only when he is dead. We know that the genial forces
of nature which work daily, equably, and without violence are
infinitely more serviceable, infinitely more admirable, than the
rude violence of the storm, however necessary or excellent the
purification it may have wrought. Should we seek to name the most
human man among those who let the nation to its struggle with
slavery, and yet was no statesmen, we should, of course, name