| | 1 | Author: | Quayle, William A. | Requires cookie* | | | 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 |
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