The splendour of human intelligence, the loftiness of genius, shine no less by contrast than by harmony with the age.

The stoic and profound philosopher is not diminished by an external debasement.

Virgil, Petrarch, Racine are great in their purple; Job is still greater on his dunghill.
But we can say, we men of the nineteenth century, that the nineteenth century is not the dunghill.

However deep the shame of the present, whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of us, democrats, will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live, the virile age of mankind.
Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason why?
because it is the mildest.

This age, the immediate issue, the firstborn offspring, of the French Revolution, frees the slave in America, raises from his degradation the _pariah_ in Asia, abolishes the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the stake, civilizes Turkey, carries the Gospel into the domain of the Koran, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to that of the most just, suppresses pirates, mitigates sentences, makes the galleys healthy, throws the red-hot iron into the sewer, condemns the penalty of death, removes the ball and chain from the leg of the convict, abolishes torture, degrades and brands war, stifles Dukes of Alva and Charles the Ninths, and extracts the claws of tyrants.
This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man.
In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,--writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful.