A HERO-PROPHET
A poor, hard-toiling ill-provided man;
Careless of what vulgar men toil for.
Not a bad man, I should say;
Something better in him than HUNGER of any sort- or these wild arab men,
Fighting and jostling three and twenty years at his hand,
In close contact with him always,
Would not have reverenced him so!
They were wild men,
Bursting ever an anon into quarrel,
Into all kind of fierce sincerity.
Without right worth or manhood,
No man could have commanded them.
They called him prophet, you say?
Why? He stood there face to face with them;
Bare, not enshrined in any mystery
Visibly, clouting his own cloak.
Cobbling his own shoes;
Fighting, counseling, ordering in the midst of them.
They must have seen what kind of man he WAS.
Let him be CALLED what you like!
No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting.
During three and twenty years of rough actual trial.
I find something of a veritable HERO necessary for that itself.
by
Thomas Carlyle
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