The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson - His Life and Confessions, Volume 2 (Electronic book text)

When we survey with rapture the state of an exalted hero arrived at all the honours which it is possible for a human being to receive from the gratitude the veneration and the love of his fellow-mortals; seen as he then is like a luminary of the first magnitude in the full blaze of meridian glory we are generally too dazzled by the lustre we behold to penetrate or even to reflect on the circuitous the tedious or the perplexed path through which he may have been constrained to pass in pursuit of the splendid destiny at length happily attained.' (Excerpt)