American Men of Action

and humorous philosopher is one of the realest figures
on the pages of history. We love Andrew Jackson for his irascible
wrong-headedness, Farragut for his burst of wrath in Mobile harbor,
Lincoln for his homely wisdom.

I have said that, read as the record of man's failures and successes,
history is an inspiring thing. Perhaps of the history of no country is
this so true as of that of ours. By far the larger part of our great men
have started at the very bottom of the ladder, in poverty and obscurity,
and have fought their way up round by round against all the forces of
society. Nowhere else have inherited wealth and inherited position
counted for so little as in America. Again, we have had no wars of greed
or ambition, unless the war with Mexico could be so called. We have, at
least, had no tyrants--instead, we have witnessed the spectacle, unique
in history, of a great general winning his country's freedom, and then
disbanding his army and retiring to his farm. "The Cincinnatus of the
West," Byron called him; and John Richard Green adds, "No nobler figure
ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life." He has emerged from the
mists of tradition, from the sanctimonious wrappings in which the early
biographers disguised him, has softened and broadened into the most
human of men, and has won our love as well as our veneration.

George Washington was the founder. Beside his name, two others stand
out, serene and dominant: Christopher Columbus, the discoverer; Abraham
Lincoln, the preserver. And yet, neither Columbus, nor Washington, nor
Lincoln was what we call a genius--a genius, that is, in the sense in
which Shakespeare or Napoleon or Galileo was a genius. But they combined
in singular degree those three characteristics without which no man may
be truly great: sincerity and courage and singleness of purpose.

It is not without a certain awe that we contemplate these men--men like
ourselves, let us always remember, but, in many ways, how different! Not
different in that they wer

John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.

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