[126]: Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave, defying the wild Ocean with its monsters and all men and things—progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons.—Hrolf or Rollo, duke of Normandy, the wild sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour.
No wild saint Dominics and Thebaid ermites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough practical endeavour, Scandinavian and other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Ulfila to Cranmer, enabled Shakspeare to speak. Nay the finished poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new epoch, new reformers needed. (On Heroes, p. 184.)
[127]: On Heroes, p. 51 et 184.
[128]: On Heroes, p. 323.
[129]: Suppose now it were some matter of vital concernment, some transcendant matter (as Divine worship is) about which your whole soul struck dumb with its excess of feeling knew not how to form itself into utterance at all, and preferred formless silence to any utterance there possible.—What should we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man—let him depart swiftly, if he love himself!—You have lost your only son, are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately offers to celebrate funeral games for him in the manner of the Greeks. (On Heroes, p. 323.)
[130]: You may take my purse... but the self is mine and God my maker's. (On Heroes, p. 330.)
[131]: T. I, p. 120.
[132]: French Revolution, t. I, p. 295, 20 et 77.
[133]: For ourselves we answer that French Revolution means here the open violent rebellion and victory of disimprisoned anarchy against corrupt worn-out authority.
So thousandfold complex a Society ready to burst up from its infinite depths; and these men its rulers and healers, without life-rule for themselves—other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an accident under the sky. Man is without duty round him, except it be to make the Constitution. He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him, he has no God in the world.