thinker in his solitary cell. But I cannot divest myself of the belief, that as everything spiritual is but the more exquisite bloom and development of the corporeal, so too, in war, the noblest forms of action and daring are crowned with the fairest moral issues. It is true we still possess, in the eventful past, the strong stem, as it were, from which these active virtues could continue to shoot and bud forth in the present. But the memory of the past is ever dimly receding from our eyes in the distances of oblivion; and while the number of those who fondly cherish its teaching is always diminishing in a nation, its influence even on them tends also gradually to decline. We seldom acknowledge, moreover, in other pursuits, however difficult or perilous, that inherent idea of greatness and glory so inseparably associated with warlike achievement—an idea, based as it is on the conception of superior power, which is far from being chimerical or imaginary.
As for the elements, we do not labour so much to oppose and subdue their antagonism, as to escape their effects and outlast their fury:—
"With the resistless might of gods
Men may not measure strength;"[1]
—deliverance is not victory; the boon which fate beneficently offers, and of which human courage and susceptibility only avail themselves, is not the fruit or the earnest of superior power. In war, moreover, every one is inspired with the feeling of rights to be defended and wrongs to be avenged; and while man, in a state of nature, esteems it a far higher object to redeem his honour than to accumulate the means
- ↑
"Mit Göttern
Soll sich nicht messen
Irgend ein Mensch."
Goethe, in dem Gedicht: Grenzen der Menschheit, ii. p. 69, Ausg. v. 1840.
