“The world wants men, large hearted, manly men;
Men who shall join its chorus, and prolong
The psalm of labour and the psalm of love.
The age wants heroes–heroes who shall dare
To struggle in the solid ranks of truth:
To clutch the monster error by the throat;
To bear opinion to a loftier seat;
To blot the error of impression out,
And lead a universal freedom in.
And heaven wants souls–fresh and capacious souls–
To taste its raptures, and expand, like flowers,
Beneath the glory of its central sun.
It wants fresh souls, not lean and shriveled ones;
It wants fresh souls–my brother, give it thine!”
We owe everything that is good and beautiful to our visions. They lead us ever to higher things. They show us glimpses of character, of attainment, of achievement, beyond what we have yet reached, and the beauty or the excellence visioned before us starts in us a discontent with our present state and a longing to climb to the loftier heights. An artist has a vision of something lovely, and paints it on his canvas or hews it out of his block of marble. An inventor has in his mind a dream of his invention; something which he believes will prove a boon to the world. He thinks and broods, and at last gives the fruit of his thinking and brooding a form that makes it practical.
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