It is honorable, because it is in fact the triumph of
lofty sentiment over an instinctive repugnance to pain, and over
those yearnings after personal ease and security which society
has condemned as ignoble. It is kept alive by pride and the fear
of shame; and thus the dread of real evil is overcome by the
superior dread of an evil which exists but in the imagination. It
has been cherished and stimulated also by various means. It has
been the theme of spirit-stirring song and chivalrous story. The
poet and minstrel have delighted to shed round it the splendors
of fiction, and even the historian has forgotten the sober
gravity of narration and broken forth into enthusiasm and
rhapsody in its praise. Triumphs and gorgeous pageants have been
its reward: monuments, on which art has exhausted its skill and
opulence its treasures, have been erected to perpetuate a
nation's gratitude and admiration. Thus artificially excited,
courage has risen to an extraordinary and factitious degree of
heroism, and, arrayed in all the glorious "pomp and circumstance
of war," this turbulent quality has even been able to eclipse
many of those quiet but invaluable virtues which silently ennoble
the human character and swell the tide of human happiness.
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