the expression of royal freedom in loyal service, of sovereignty in obedience, courage in concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble.  Low may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an elevated and ascending heart:  there is nothing loftier, nothing less allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness.  The worm, because it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension.  Only a great pride, that is, a great and reverential repose in one’s own being, renders possible a noble humility, which is a great and reverential acknowledgment of the being of others; this humility in turn sustains a higher self-reverence; this again resolves itself into a more majestic humility; and so run, in ever enhancing wave, the great circles of inward honor and outward grace.  And without this self-sustaining return of the action into itself, each quality feeding itself from its correlative opposite, there can be no high behavior.  This is the reason why qualities loftiest in kind and largest in measure are vulgarly mistaken, not for their friendly opposites, but for their mere contraries,—­why a very profound sensibility, a sensibility, too, peculiarly of the spirit, not of nerve only, is sure to be named coldness, as Mr. Ruskin recently remarks,—­why vast wealth of good pride, in its often meek acceptance of wrong, in its quiet ignoring of insult, in its silent superiority to provocation, passes with the superficial and petulant for poverty of pride and mere mean-spiritedness,—­why a courage which is not partial, but total, coexisting, as it always does, with a noble peacefulness, with a noble inaptness for frivolous hazards, and a noble slowness to take offence, is, in its delays and forbearances, thought by the half-courageous to be no better than cowardice;—­it is, as we have said, because great qualities revolve and repose in orbits of reciprocation with their opposites, which opposites are by coarse and ungentle eyes misdeemed to be contraries.  Feeling transcendently deep and powerful is unimpassioned and far lower-voiced than indifference and unfeelingness, being wont to express itself, not by eloquent ebullition, but by extreme understatement, or even by total silence.  Sir Walter Raleigh, when at length he found himself betrayed to death—­and how basely betrayed!—­by Sir Lewis Stukely, only said, “Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn to your credit.”  The New Testament tells us of a betrayal yet more quietly received.  These are instances of noble manners.

What actions are absolutely moral is determined by application of the same law,—­those only which repose wholly in themselves, being to themselves at once motive and reward.  “Miserable is he,” says the “Bhagavad Gita,” “whose motive to action lies, not in the action itself, but in its reward.”  Duty purchased with covenant of special delights is not duty, but is the most pointed possible denial of it.  The just man looks not beyond justice; the merciful reposes in acts of mercy; and he who would be bribed to equity and goodness is not only bad, but shameless.  But of this no further words.