rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and
sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, your
body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and
have more orders on its breast--crowns on its head, if you will.
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up
and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at their
tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough within
it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on
its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull;--no
more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel?
Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and
verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us
grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who
desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who means
only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more
fortune, and more public honour, and--NOT more personal soul. He
only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose
blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into
Living {22} peace. And the men who have this life in them are the
true lords or kings of the earth--they, and they only. All other
kingships, so far as they are true, are only the practical issue and
expression of theirs; if less than this, they are either dramatic
royalties,--costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels, instead
of tinsel--but still only the toys of nations; or else they are no
royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practical
issue of national folly; for which reason I have said of them
elsewhere, "Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the
diseases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of more."
But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear Kinghood still
spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if governed nations were a
personal property, and might be bought and sold, or otherwise
acquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose
fleece he was to gather; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base
kings, "people-eating," were the constant and proper title of all
monarchs; and the enlargement of a king's dominion meant the same
thing as the increase of a private man's estate! Kings who think
so, however powerful, can no more be the true kings of the nation
than gadflies are the kings of a horse; they suck it, and may drive
it wild, but do not guide it. They, and their courts, and their
armies are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of marsh
mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered
trumpeting, in the summer air; the twilight being, perhaps,
sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering
mists of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly,
if at all, and hate ruling; too many of them make "il gran rifiuto;"
and if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely to become
useful to it, is pretty sure to make ITS "gran rifiuto" of THEM.
Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if ever day
comes when he will estimate his dominion by the FORCE of it,--not
the geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent
cuts you a cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there.
But it does matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily say
to this man, "Go," and he goeth; and to another, "Come," and he
cometh. Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent--and
where it is that you bid them come, and where go. It matters to