[117]: Miscellanies, p. 11, 121, 148.
[118]: We find no heroism of character in him, from first to last; nay, there is not, that we know of, one great thought in all his six and thirty quartos.... He sees but a little way into Nature; the mighty All in its beauty and infinite mysterious grandeur, humbling the small me into nothingness, has never even for moments been revealed to him; only this and that other atom of it, and the differences and discrepancies of these two, has he looked into and noted down. His theory of the world, his picture of man and man's life is little; for a poet and philosopher even pitiful. "The Divine Idea that which lies at the bottom of appearance" was never more invisible to any man. He reads history not with the eyes of a devout seer or even of a critic, but through a pair of mere anti-catholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama enacted on the theater of Infinitude, with suns for lamps and Eternity as back-ground... but a poor wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne.... God's Universe is a larger patrimony of Saint Peter, from where it were pleasant and well to hunt the Pope.... The still higher praise of having had a right or noble aim cannot be conceded to him without many limitations, and may plausibly enough be altogether denied.... The force necessary for him was no wise a great and noble one; but a small, in some respects a mean one, to be nimbly and seasonably put into use. The Ephesian temple which it had employed many wise heads and strong arms, for a life-time, to build, could be un-built by one madman, in a single hour.
[119]: Voyez ce double éloge dans Wilhelm Meister.
[120]: On Heroes, t. I, p. 71.
[121]: Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world; the soul of the whole world's history, it may be justly considered, were the history of these. (On Heroes, p. 1.)
[122]: Such a man is what we call an original man; he comes to us at first hand. A messenger he, sent from the infinite unknown with tidings to us.... Direct from the inner fact of things.—He lives and has to live in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable following hearsays; it glares upon him.... It is from the heart of the world that he comes. He is portion of the primal reality of things. (On Heroes, p. 71.)
[123]: Cromwell's Speeches and Letters, t. II, p. 668.
[124]: The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of heroism, what of Eternal light was in man and his life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities, remains for ever a new divine portion of the sum of things.
(Cromwell's Letters, dernier chapitre.)
[125]: Loyalty, mot intraduisible, qui désigne le sentiment de subordination, quand il est noble.