But it is a belief propagated
in books, and which passes currently among talking
men as part of their familiar wisdom, that the hearts of the
many _are_ constitutionally weak, that they _do_ languish, and
are slow to answer to the requisitions of things. I entreat
those who are in this delusion to look behind them and
about them for the evidence of experience. Now this, rightly
understood, not only gives no support to any such belief,
but proves that the truth is in direct opposition to it. The
history of all ages--tumults after tumults, wars foreign or
civil, with short or with no breathing-places from generation to
generation; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions,
vanishing, and reviving, and piercing each other like the
Northern Lights; public commotions, and those in the breast
of the individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject;
the blast, like the blast of the desert, which sweeps perennially
through a frightful solitude of its own making in the
mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening, but ever quickening,
descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the
agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings
of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition .
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