The
Germans liked the bold old fellow, and called, and still call him,
Marshal Forwards. He had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them,
like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl. To
our minds, the best of all these heroes is Robert Hall, the preacher,
who, after falling on the ground in paroxysms of pain, would rise with a
smile, and say, "I suffered much, but I did not cry out, did I? did I
cry out?" Beautiful is this heroism. Nature, base enough under some
aspects, rises into grandeur in such an example, and shoots upwards to
an Alpine height of pure air and cloudless sunshine; the bold, noble,
and kindly nature of the man, struggling against pain, and asking, in an
apologetic tone, "Did I cry out?" whilst his lips were white with
anguish, and his tongue, bitten through in the paroxysm, was red with
blood!
There is a companion picture of ineffaceable grandeur to this in Plato's
"Phoedo," where Socrates, who has been unchained simply that he may
prepare for death, sits upon his bed, and, rubbing his leg gently where
the iron had galled it, begins, not a complaint against fate, or his
judges, or the misery of present death, but a grateful little
reflection. "What an unaccountable thing, my friends, that seems to be
which men call pleasure; and how wonderful it is related to that which
appears to be its contrary--pain, in that they will not both be present
to a man at the same time; yet if any one pursues and attains the one,
he is almost always compelled to receive the other, as if they were both
united together from one head.
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