Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/50

 one stands up with the light of a great deed on it, relieved against the rest in a glory as of sunrise. It is the poem which places on everlasting record the heroism of a child of twelve, condemned to be shot after all his companions, who asked leave to go first and take his watch home to his mother, promising to come back in time to die in his turn. They let him go, laughing at the infantine shallowness of the pretence; the little blackguard was afraid; off with you! He went, and returned. Even the soldiers of Thiers and Galifet could not slaughter that boy; the officer in command gave him his life, and the master-poet of his nation has given him immortality. The verses in which the greater of these two gifts is bestowed come like a draught of wine to the lips of one sick and faint amid all the pitiful and fearful record of evil inflicted and endured; they refresh, rekindle, re-illuminate the sunken spirit with a flush and thrill of high delight.

But it is possible to meet death with another kind of fearlessness than this, a quality which is not of the light but of the darkness; not with divine defiance as a hero, but with desperate indifference as a slave: nor is any society sound or any state secure which has found out no way to cure this dismal readiness to be killed off, this grim facility in dying. Upon all these to whom we have made life so hard that old men and children alike are ready to leave it without a word or tear, in tragic disdain, as of men strangers to their own death, whose grave was long since ready dug in their heart; upon all to whom we have refused the right of the body to its meat and the right of the spirit to its food, to whom we have given