not see.

Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is
spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood!
Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor
daily necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into
this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not
be in it also a great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether
ignoble, though even its only end may appear to be your daily
food. A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the
world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain. Men and
women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in
your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep
under every green hill-side.

You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that
war. There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a
judge's bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly
honour, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the
breach. Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the
coffin; it is a hand-to-hand struggle all the sad, slow way,
fought in solitude,--a battle that began with the first
heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the drops ooze
out, and sudden halt in the veins,--a victory, if you can gain
it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the
wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.

Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have
known, and how they conquered or were worsted in the fight. Very
common lives, I know,--such as are swarming in yonder