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[348] men whose wits, like those of Ajax, lie intheir sinews, and who are ‘yoked like draught-oxen and made to plough up the wars,’ is no realization of my ideal of true courage. Yet I am not conscious of having lost in any degree my early admiration of heroic achievement. The feeling remains; but it has found new and better objects. I have learned to appreciate what Milton calls the martyr's ‘unresistible might of meekness,’ —the calm, uncomplaining endurance of those who can bear up against persecution uncheered by sympathy or applause, and, with a full and keen appreciation of the value of all which they are called to sacrifice, confront danger and death in unselfish devotion to duty. Fox, preaching through his prison-gates or rebuking Oliver Cromwell in the midst of his soldier-court; Henry Vane beneath the axe of the headsman; Mary Dyer on the scaffold at Boston; Luther closing his speech at Worms with the sublime emphasis of his ‘Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me;’ William Penn defending the rights of Englishmen from the baledock of the Fleet prison; Clarkson climbing the decks of Liverpool slaveships; Howard penetrating to infected dungeons; meek Sisters of Charity breathing contagion in thronged hospitals,—all these, and such as these, now help me to form the loftier ideal of Christian heroism. Blind Milton approaches nearly to my conception of a true hero. What a picture have we of that sublime old man, as sick, poor, blind, and abandoned of friends, he still held fast his heroic
Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
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