3.  We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of political science, or of private economy.  Life is a festival only to the wise.  Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.  The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also.  The disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such compound misery.  A lockjaw that bends a man’s head back to his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering.  Unhappily, almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

4.  Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man.  Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behavior.

5.  Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army of enemies.  To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism.  Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war.  It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer.  The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.  There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature.  Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it.  There is somewhat in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them.  Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines.  It is the avowal of the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.