| 1 | Author: | Quayle, William A. | Add | | | Title: | A Hero — Jean Valjean  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE hero is not a luxury, but a necessity.
We can no more do without him than we
can do without the sky. Every best man and
woman is at heart a hero-worshiper. Emerson
acutely remarks that all men admire Napoleon
because he was themselves in possibility. They
were in miniature what he was developed. For
a like though nobler reason, all men love heroes.
They are ourselves grown tall, puissant, victorious,
and sprung into nobility, worth, service. The hero
electrifies the world; he is the lightning of the soul,
illuminating our sky, clarifying the air, making it
thereby salubrious and delightful. What any elect
spirit did, inures to the credit of us all. A
fragment of Lowell's clarion verse may stand for the
biography of heroism: | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 2 | Author: | Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas | Add | | | Title: | The Ship of Stars | | | | Published: | 2001 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Until his ninth year the boy about whom this story is written lived
in a house which looked upon the square of a county town. The house
had once formed part of a large religious building, and the boy's
bedroom had a high groined roof, and on the capstone an angel carved,
with outspread wings. Every night the boy wound up his prayers with
this verse which his grandmother had taught him:
"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head;
One to watch, one to pray,
Two to bear my soul away."
Then he would look up to the angel and say: "Only Luke is with me."
His head was full of
queer texts and beliefs. He supposed the three
other angels to be always waiting in the next room, ready to bear
away the soul of his grandmother (who was bed-ridden), and that he
had Luke for an angel because he was called Theophilus, after the
friend for whom St. Luke had written his Gospel and the Acts of the
Holy Apostles. His name in full was Theophilus John Raymond, but
people called him Taffy. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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