What, for instance, was exile? it was but a change of place, an absence from one's native land; and, if you looked at the swarming multitudes in Rome itself, you would find that the majority of them were practically in contented and willing exile, drawn thither by necessity, by ambition, or by the search for the best opportunities of vice. No isle so wretched and so bleak which did not attract some voluntary sojourners; even this precipitous and naked rock of Corsica, the hungriest, roughest, most savage, most unhealthy spot conceivable, had more foreigners in it than native inhabitants. The natural restlessness and mobility of the human mind, which arose from its aetherial origin, drove men to change from place to place. The colonies of different nations, scattered all over the civilized and uncivilized world even in spots the most chilly and uninviting, show that the condition of place is no necessary ingredient in human happiness. Even Corsica had often changed its owners; Greeks from Marseilles had first lived there, then Ligurians and Spaniards, then some Roman colonists, whom the aridity and thorniness of the rock had not kept away.
"Varro thought that nature, Brutus that the consciousness of virtue, were sufficient consolations for any exile. How little have I lost in comparison with those two fairest possessions which I shall everywhere enjoy--nature and my own integrity! Whoever or whatever made the world--whether it were a deity, or disembodied reason, or a divine interfusing spirit, or destiny, or an immutable series of connected causes--the result was that nothing, except our very meanest possessions, should depend on the will of another. Man's best gifts lie beyond the power of man either to give or to take away. This Universe, the grandest and loveliest work of nature, and the Intellect which was created to observe and to admire it, are our special and eternal possessions, which shall last as long as we last ourselves. Cheerful, therefore, and erect, let us hasten with undaunted footsteps whithersoever our fortunes lead us.
"There is no land where man cannot dwell,--no land where he cannot uplift his eyes to heaven; wherever we are, the distance of the divine from the human remains the same. So then, as long as my eyes are not robbed of that spectacle with which they cannot be satiated, so long as I may look upon the sun and moon, and fix my lingering gaze on the other constellations, and consider their rising and setting and the spaces between them and the causes of their less and greater speed,--while I may contemplate the multitude of stars glittering throughout the heaven, some stationary, some revolving, some suddenly blazing forth, others dazzling the gaze with a flood of fire as though they fell, and others leaving over a long space their trails of light; while I am in the midst of such phenomena, and mingle myself, as far as a man may, with things celestial,--while my soul is ever occupied in contemplations so sublime as these, what matters it what ground I tread?