Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/119

Rh gods of Philistia, “the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” It is often the soft hand which wounds to death. With the winter to oppose him, Hannibal stormed the Alps, and carried them; but with the summer for his ally, his “invincible Carthaginians” and elephants fell and perished in wealthy Capua. How many a Sir John Franklin has gone to pieces, made shipwreck and perished, amid the delicate luxuries of London, Paris, Boston, and New York, and no exploring expedition, no adventurous Captain Kane, was sent out after him; in vain his wife has spent the last farthing of her estate, and found no trace of the man who had perished in the city's worse than snow.

It is a thin soil which bears the richest grapes; men make it poorer, covering the surface with slate stone “to draw the sun.” Peru yields silver and gold; it is a poor country. New England bears nothing but granite, timber, and ice, which we make into men; it is the richest of all lands the sun shines upon. Freedom grows in poor Wisconsin, in cold New England; but in the fat plains of Mississippi and Alabama, slaves and slave-masters only mingle and multiply and rot.

Sons of rich men very seldom get the best of even mere intellectual education. It is said that, for four generations, no man in England, who has inherited two hundred pounds a year, has become eminent as a lawyer or physician. Money commands the college, libraries—“tall copies” and “best editions” of costly books—time, and tutors; but poverty commands Industry, and she is the mother of Culture. Nay, well-born Genius is the child of Time and Misfortune; the star which heralds his birth goes before the wise men, and when it stops, “stands still over a stable.” The great God knows best what cradling to give his child, and it is easier for the sun of the soul to climb over mountains of ice than to transcend the little hills of gold and silver. Apollo, so the old myth relates, was inimically sold as a slave to King Admetus, who set him in hard service to tend the sheep and cows and swine, whereat his goddess-sister mourned. If his foes had wished to take the soul of poetry out of him, they had done better to have set him in a palace,