юб Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
and on the mountain top they buried him, as he would have
wished it, for so he had sung it in “Requiem”:
“Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ’grave for me :
‘Here he lies where he longed to be ;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’ ”
As the reflective man gets older he realizes that some of
the wisest things are said by people with no special reputa-
tion for cleverness, who merely sum up life’s experience in
a colorless phrase. As daylight reveals the object without
attracting attention to itself, so their simple language leaves
us nothing to think about but the thought itself. Not long
ago I was with some companions in a railway station. In
another group stood an elderly woman surrounded by her
friends. She was starting for New York, where an eminent
medical specialist was to make a final examination which in
all probability would result in a verdict of certain death
from a terrible disease, but she was laughing and chatting as
cheerily as if she were starting on a pleasure trip. Then a
member of my party, a woman who set up no claim to clev-
erness, said, “After all, it is really easier to be entirely
brave.”
That is the text. To be partly brave is to be sometimes
troubled by fear; to be entirely brave is to be never troubled
by fear. To be partly brave is to be sometimes depressed;
to be entirely brave is to be joyous with a lyric joy. Men