Jul. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.

Master. Very likely, ’Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole.  Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.  The great will not condescend to take anything seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years.  Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws[347] of the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences.

12.  The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose.  All these great and transcendent properties are ours.  If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment.  Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses.  The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number and size.  Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear?  Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame.  Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography.  But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best.  See to it only that thyself is here;—­and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.  Epaminondas,[348] brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus[349] to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine.  He lies very well where he is.  The Jerseys[350] were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton.[351] A great man makes his climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved element of all delicate spirits.  That country is the fairest, which is inhabited by the noblest minds.  The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions of Pericles,[352] Xenophon,[353] Columbus,[354] Bayard,[355] Sidney,[356] Hampden,[357] teach us how needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our days.