many a hero.  We should have had no Stephenson, no Faraday, no Arkwright, and no Watt.  Our railways would have been unbuilt, and the Atlantic Ocean would have been unbridged by steam.  But hope, as phrenologists tells us, lies above caution, and has dangerous and active neighbors—­wit, imagination, language, ideality—­so the poor cottage is hung round with fancies, and the man exists to help his fellows.  He may fail; but others take up his tangled thread, and unravel it, and carry on the great business of life.

The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and disappointments, who takes them just for what they are—­lessons, and perhaps blessings in disguise—­is the true hero.  He is like a strong swimmer; the waves dash over him, but he is never submerged.  We can not help applauding and admiring such a man; and the world, good-natured and wise in its verdict, cheers him when he gains the goal.  There may be brutality in the sport, but there can be no question as to the merit, when the smaller prizefighter, who receives again and again his adversary’s knockdown blow, again gets up and is ready for the fray.  Old General Blucher was not a lucky general.  He was beaten almost every time he ventured to battle; but in an incredible space of time he had gathered together his routed army, and was as formidable as before.  The Germans liked the bold old fellow, and called, and still call him, Marshal Forwards.  He had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them, like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl.  To our minds, the best of all these heroes is Robert Hall, the preacher, who, after falling on the ground in paroxysms of pain, would rise with a smile, and say, “I suffered much, but I did not cry out, did I? did I cry out?” Beautiful is this heroism.  Nature, base enough under some aspects, rises into grandeur in such an example, and shoots upwards to an Alpine height of pure air and cloudless sunshine; the bold, noble, and kindly nature of the man, struggling against pain, and asking, in an apologetic tone, “Did I cry out?” whilst his lips were white with anguish, and his tongue, bitten through in the paroxysm, was red with blood!

There is a companion picture of ineffaceable grandeur to this in Plato’s “Phoedo,” where Socrates, who has been unchained simply that he may prepare for death, sits upon his bed, and, rubbing his leg gently where the iron had galled it, begins, not a complaint against fate, or his judges, or the misery of present death, but a grateful little reflection.  “What an unaccountable thing, my friends, that seems to be which men call pleasure; and how wonderful it is related to that which appears to be its contrary—­pain, in that they will not both be present to a man at the same time; yet if any one pursues and attains the one, he is almost always compelled to receive the other, as if they were both united together from one head.”  Surely true philosophy, if we may call so serene a state of mind by that hackneyed word, never reached, unaided, a purer height!