Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our
weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the
price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has
never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou
forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the
relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which
straightway closes the wound with a pearl.
* * *
The graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the
graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and
undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could
give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey
laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops
have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the
tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed,
but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to
us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun.
Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil
of virtue--and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of
_nameless_ heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool
from which history surveys the _one_ hero, whose name is embalmed,
bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are
those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.
And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex,
and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in
the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless
far more beautiful and noble than in our own.