It is, therefore, a foolish delusion to suppose, that, as the world grows more pacific, the demand for physical courage passes away.  It is only that its applications become nobler.  In barbarous ages, men fight against men and animals, and need, like Achilles, to be fed on the marrow of wild beasts.  As time elapses, the savage animals are extirpated, the savage men are civilized; but Nature, acting through science, commerce, society, is still creating new exigencies of peril, and evoking new types of courage to meet them.  Grace Darling at her oars, Kane in his open boat, Stephenson testing his safety-lamp in the terrible pit,—­what were the trophies of Miltiades to these?  The ancient Agamemnon faced no danger so memorable as that ocean-storm which beset his modern namesake, bearing across the waters a more priceless treasure than Helen, pride of Greece.  And, indeed, setting aside these sublimities of purpose, and looking simply at the quantity and quality of peril, it is doubtful whether any tale of the sea-kings thrills the blood more worthily than the plain newspaper narrative of Captain Thomas Bailey, in the Newburyport schooner, “Atlas,” beating out of the Gut of Canso, in a gale of wind, with his crew of two men and a boy, up to their waists in the water.

It is easy to test the matter.  Let any one, who believes that the day of daring is past, beg or buy a ride on the locomotive of the earliest express-train, some cold winter-morning.  One wave of the conductor’s hand, and the live engine springs snorting beneath you, as no Arab steed ever rushed over the desert.  It is not like being bound to an arrow, for that motion would be smoother; it is not like being hurled upon an ocean crest, for that would be slower.  You are rushing onward, and you are powerless; that is all.  The frosty air gives such a brittle and slippery look to the two iron lines which lie between you and destruction, that you appreciate the Mohammedan fable of the Bridge Herat, thinner than a hair, sharper than a scimitar, which stretches over hell and leads to paradise.  Nothing has passed over that perilous track for many hours; the cliffs may have fallen and buried it, the frail bridges may have sunk beneath it, or diabolical malice put obstructions on it, no matter how trivial, equally fatal to you; each curving embankment may hide unknown horrors, from which, though all others escape, you, on the engine, cannot; and yet, still the surging locomotive bounds onward, beneath your mad career.  You draw a long breath, as you dismount at last, a hundred miles away, as if you had been riding with Mazeppa or Brunechilde, and yet escaped alive.  And there, by your side, stands the quiet, grimy engineer, turning already to his tobacco and his newspaper, and unconscious, while he reads of the charge at Balaklava, that his life is Balaklava every day.