Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in cynicism or despair?  Why, then, should we not boldly affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the only reality, the truth which outlasts us all?  But this may seem a subtle evasion rather than a frank answer.  Let us rather say that idealism is one of the necessary modes of man’s faith, brings in the future, and assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist.  I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.  We forecast the future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves?  Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be gained?  The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or moment can hold.  To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp.  It is the law of our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way.  There is no falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead of a possession of it.  Will you limit us to one moment of time and place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual America?  Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, a future whose beneficence no man can sum?  Is there any falsehood in this ideal country that men have ever held precious?  Did Pericles lie in his great oration, and Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervid Italian lines?  And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool in all his motley the art of literature.