Actions pass away and are forgotten, or are only discernible in their
effects; conquerors, statesmen, and kings live but by their names
stamped on the page of history. Hume says rightly that more people think
about Virgil and Homer (and that continually) than ever trouble their
heads about Caesar or Alexander. In fact, poets are a longer-lived race
than heroes: they breathe more of the air of immortality. They survive
more entire in their thoughts and acts. We have all that Virgil or Homer
did, as much as if we had lived at the same time with them: we can hold
their works in our hands, or lay them on our pillows, or put them to our
lips. Scarcely a trace of what the others did is left upon the earth, so
as to be visible to common eyes. The one, the dead authors, are living
men, still breathing and moving in their writings. The others, the
conquerors of the world, are but the ashes in an urn. The sympathy (so
to speak) between thought and thought is more intimate and vital than
that between thought and action. Thought is linked to thought as flame
kindles into flame: the tribute of admiration to the manes of departed
heroism is like burning incense in a marble monument. Words, ideas,
feelings, with the progress of time harden into substances: things,
bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt into a sound, into thin
air!--Yet though the schoolmen in the Middle Ages disputed more about
the texts of Aristotle than the battle of Arbela, perhaps Alexander's
Generals in his lifetime admired his pupil as much and liked him better.
For not only a man's actions are effaced and vanish with him; his
virtues and generous qualities die with him also: his intellect only is
immortal and bequeathed unimpaired to posterity. Words are the only
things that last for ever.--W. HAZLITT. _Table Talk._