>But the Consul's brow was sad, >And the Consul's speech was low,>And darkly looked he at the wall, >And darkly at the foe. >"Their van will be upon us >Before the bridge goes down;>And if they once may win the bridge, >What hope to save the town?">Then out spake brave Horatius, >The Captain of the Gate:>"To every man upon this earth >Death cometh soon or late. >And how can man die better >Than facing fearful odds, >For the ashes of his fathers, >And the temples of his gods, >And for the tender mother >Who dandled him to rest, >And for the wife who nurses>His baby at her breast, >And for the holy maidens>Who feed the eternal flame, >To save them from false Sextus>That wrought the deed of shame?">"Haul down the bridge, Sir Consul, >With all the speed ye may;>I, with two more to help me, >Will hold the foe in play.>In yon straight path a thousand >May well be stopped by three. >Now who will stand on either hand, >And keep the bridge with me?"
>>23632240To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish,—should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness,—to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendor; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders, in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapors!—Our Wilderness is the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years of suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also comes an end. Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness of Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is left. To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled, doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariest wanderings, to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes—of that Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!
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