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Updated: May 28, 2025
Union and Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater of these was Union. The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the Kentucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable act of his life was his successful management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise of 1850.
The prolonged life of Lord Mar cost her many tears, for the master-passions of her nature, which she had laid asleep on her marriage with the earl, broke out with redoubled violence at the sight of Wallace. His was the most perfect of manly forms and she loved; he was great and her ambition blazed into an unextinguishable flame.
The great master-passion of his life had gone on gathering and growing till it became, as such master-passions will, when there is neither honour nor religion to check them, a fury, over which he had lost all control. And he felt that, having gone so far, there was no crime, no outrage, he would shrink from committing, to obtain what he desired now.
Surely, if her thoughts wandered so far along the backward current of her life, she must have repented in bitterness and despair of that first day in which the master-passions of her life had become her rulers, and the three demons of Vanity, Selfishness, and Ambition, had joined hands and said, "This woman is our slave, let us see what she will become under our guidance."
And yet, despite the Arcadian tranquillity of the landscape, the drowsy quiet of the pine-groves, the deep and solemn shade of those dark avenues, where one might fondly hope to find some Druidess lingering beneath the shelter of the oaks, there is excitement of no common order to be found in the miniature watering-place of Forêtdechêne; and the reflective and observant traveller, on a modern sentimental journey, has only to enter the stately white building with the glittering plate-glass windows in order to behold the master-passions or the human breast unveiled for his pleasure and edification.
De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity, repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the outside world, but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for the purposes of scorn.
These modes of action, so unlike our fashions of to-day, made a deep impression on me." He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the master-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure of his high calling.
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