When
with pomp a huge sphere is drawn along the streets, by the efforts of a
hundred men,2 I seem to discover each striving to
imitate its gait, and keep step with it, — if possible to swell to its
own diameter. But onward it moves, and conquers the multitude with its
majesty. What shame, then, that our lives, which might so well be the source
of planetary motion, and sanction the order of the spheres, should be full of
abruptness and angularity, so as not to roll nor move majestically!
The Romans “made Fortune sirname to Fortitude,” for fortitude is
that alchemy that turns all things to good fortune. The man of fortitude,
whom the Latins called fortis is no other
than that lucky person whom fors favors, or vir
summae fortis. If we will, every bark may “carry Cæsar and
Cæsar’s fortune.” For an impenetrable shield, stand
inside yourself; he was no artist, but an artisan, who first made shields of
brass. For armor of proof, mea virtute me involvo, — I
wrap myself in my virtue;
“Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, smiling yet.”
If you let a single ray of light through the shutter, it will go on diffusing
itself without limit till it enlighten the world; but the shadow that was
never so wide at first, as rapidly contracts till it comes to naught. The
shadow of the moon, when it passes nearest the sun, is lost in space ere it
can reach our earth to eclipse it. Always the System shines with uninterrupted
light; for as the sun is so much alrger than any planet, no shadow can travel
far into space. We may bask always in the light of the System, always may step
back out of the shade. No man’s shadow is as large as his body, if the
rays make a right angle with the reflecting surface. Let our lives be passed
under the equator, with the sun in the meridian.
There is no ill which may not be dissipated like the dark, if you let in a
stronger light upon it. Overcome evil with good. Practice no such narrow
economy as they, whose bravery amounts to no more light than a farthing
candle, before which most objects cast a shadow wider than themselves.
Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow; she has not provided
for, but by a thousand contrivances against it: she has
bevelled the margin of the eyelids, that the tears may not overflow on the
cheeks. It was a conceit of Plutarch, accounting for the preference given
to signs observed on the left hand, that men may have thought “things
terrestrial and mortal directly over against heavenly and divine thing, and
do conjecture that the things which to us are on the left hand, the gods
send down from their right hand.”3 If we
are not blind, we shall see how a right hand is stretched over all, —
as well the unlucky as the lucky, — and that the ordering Soul is only
right-handed, distributing with one palm all our fates.
What first suggested that necessity was grim, and made fate to be so fatal?
The strongest is always the least violent. Necessity is my eastern cushion on
which I recline. My eye revels in its prospect as in the summer haze. I ask
no more but to be left alone with it. It is the bosom of time and the lap of
eternity. To be necessary is to be needful, and necessity is only another
name for inflexibility of good. How I welcome my grim fellow, and walk arm in
arm with him.
