Mountains never shake hands.
Their roots may touch;
they may keep together some way up:
but at length they part company,
and rise into individual isolated peaks.
So it is with great men.
As mountains mostly run in chains and clusters,
crossing the plain at wider or narrower intervals,
in like manner are there epochs in history
when great men appear in clusters also.
At first too they grow up together,
seeming to be animated by the same spirit,
to have the same desires and antipathies,
the same purposes and ends.
But after a while the genius of each begins to know itself,
and to follow its own bent;
they separate and diverge more and more;
and those who, when young,
where working in consort, stand alone in their old age.
-Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
