Character is Shown by Works HOW any many are the acts of one man in which we recognise the same character! See the variety of the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. Thus at first we have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch have given it a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were, and what they did. Then we have the same soul expressed for us again in their literature; in poems, drama, and philosophy: a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture-the purest sensuous beauty -the perfect medium never overstepping the limit of charming propriety and grace. Then we have it once more in sculpture—‘the tongue on the balance of expression,' those forms in every action, at every age of life, ranging through all the scale of condition, from god to beast, and never transgressing the ideal serenity, but in convulsive exertion the liege of order and of law. Thus, of the genius of one remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation-the most various expression of one moral thing: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble Centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion? Yet do these varied external expressions proceed from one national mind. History. HE infallible index of true progress is THE found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together, can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavourable circumstance. The Over Soul. Character Cannot be Hid |