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Sure I niver loved me father as I do thim." I would have given kingdoms in those days to have been seventeen and James Ray. When he was in the fort I dogged his footsteps, and listened with a painful yearning to the stories of his escapes from the roving bands. And as many a character is watered in its growth by hero-worship, so my own grew firmer in the contemplation of Ray's resourcefulness.
Dante puts Brutus and Cassius in hell not because he knows the real history of their acts, or because he is qualified to judge of the moral and political conditions under which they acted, but simply because he is a Ghibelin, and they slew the head of the Holy Roman Empire; and the present change of opinion arises, in the main, not from the discovery of any new fact, or from the better sifting of those already known, but from the prevalence of new sentiments Imperialism of different shades, Bonapartist or Positivist, and perhaps also hero-worship, which of course fixes upon Caesar.
Yet it was simply the first of many instances in which the gratitude of the people, backed by innate hero-worship, has singled out a war hero for the highest civic honours. Hence it came about that the very unanimity of election, for which all had hoped, defeated the purpose of the framers of the Constitution to have an unbiassed selection made by the presidential electors.
But hero-worship which can stand the strain of actual converse is rare indeed, especially when the expectant devotee is endowed with keen insight and habits of trenchant expression. One phrase has come down to us as a result of the interview; but this phrase contains a volume of meaning.
It was from the veterans of this Eighteenth Cavalry, men whom Lindsey had led, that we younger soldiers learned our best lessons in the months that followed. Those were my years of hero-worship. I had gone into this service with an ideal, and the influence of such men as Morton and Forsyth, the skill of Grover, and the daring of Donovan and Stillwell were an inspiration to me.
From the first she had raised him to the empty pedestal vacated by that fallen idol, her father. And out of hero-worship had grown love, at first the exalted devotion of an immature girl, adoration that was purely sexless and selfless a mystical love without passion, spiritual. He had appeared to her as a being of another sphere and, mentally, she had knelt at his feet as to a patron saint.
Strangely enough, all civilized nations to-day have proclaimed Prussia accursed. Yet we continue to hero-worship the man who made Prussia what she is. A halo still surrounds the Mephistophelian figure which incarnates the Hohenzollern spirit. A legend has gathered round the philosopher of Sans Souci.
It seemed to me characteristic once when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood up and took his crutch from the corner.
He read the titles of the books. One was an English edition of Carlyle's "Hero-worship"; the other was a charming elzevir, in modern binding, the "Manual of Epictetus," a German translation published at Leyden in 1634. On examining the books, he found that all the pages were underlined and annotated.
But I doubt whether public opinion, as now existing, will admit of hero-worship." "Public opinion is the best safeguard for a great man's great name," said Mr. Stistick, with intense reliance on the civilization of his own era. "Quite true, sir; quite true," said the baron, "for the space of twenty-four hours." Then followed a calm, and then coffee.
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