Here are some intriguing thoughts on courage from March, an excellent Civil War-era novel by Geraldine Brooks (it just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, by the way). Mr. March - the patriarch of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women clan - narrates the story. He heads to the South to serve the cause of abolitionism while his wife and daughters hold down the fort in Concord, Massachusetts:

Who is the brave man - he who feels no fear?

If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind

devoid of rationality and imagination. The brave

man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats,

feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of

this moves forward to do the act he dreads.