INTRODUCTION. THE lives of the good and great are the heritage of the ages. While they are with us they enrich us with our choicest treasures. When they depart from us they bequeath the still richer legacy of the memory of their noble deeds and exalted virtues -richer, because what was little and ignoble in them perishes with their dust; while only what was good and pure remains, taking on greater lustre after their translation. From their thrones in the heavens they shed down upon us a more potent influence than that which they excited when they were journeying the vale of our earthly suffering with us. They do not more really live in their far-off homes than in our memories and fond affections. We do not see them or touch themmuch as we long to-but we feel their presence and power. We persuade ourselves that invisibly they linger in our homes. as ministering angels-if not sharing our sorrows, at least watching in loving vigils over us. As when they were alive we wanted every one to know and love them, so, being dead, we desire to transmit to unborn ages the knowledge of them. The desire, I take it, is not more natural than beautiful-not more honoring to the dead than ennobling to the living. There is that in a true biography which charms us with a strange spell. We find in it, however it may differ from our own history and experiences, an image of our deepest self; which, under all varieties, is in substance the same in every humanity. We witness the same struggles of the better with the more ignoble qualities--the same alternations of doubt and trust, of fear and hope—the same sorrows and joys and loves the same earthly and heavenly longings-the same tuggings at the heart-the same successes and defeats—the same all things that enter into this strange earthly life we are living -the same coming and going of the bright and dark days over the mottled landscape of our being. So we are rebuked and comforted, chided and encouraged on the same page. The communion, when the life we contemplate is on the whole beautiful and good, is healthful. Unconsciously we enter into its confluence, make it our own, and, with greater clearness than if it were actually ours, discern and appreciate its good and evil. the What a wonderful thing a human life is! Who considers it rightly? I do not now mean some human life, but any human life- not the life of the great more than the little. On some day - and it matters not when or where good God, Father of us all, lays a little babe on a woman's breast. It is a wee thing, just breathing a soft, sweet breath, the faintest ripple of an unconscious life--the merest germ. It is the dawn of an immortal history of strange, I was about to write divine, consciousnesses. Earthquakes rend the globe, great forces convulse, it may be, the sidereal universe, INTRODUCTION. xiii but in that fragile bosom are stored potencies mightier than all material agencies- not so obvious, but infinitely greater. Helpless it lies there on the pillow of maternal love. The fountain springing at its lips nourishes it. It drinks and sleeps and grows. A little while and its dull eye grows bright. Inquisitive wonder looks out between the lids. The days and weeks and months swell into years. The baby is a boy-the boy a youth-the youth a man. Mustering up the years to the drum-beat of each pulse, come joys and sorrows, hopes and loves. Young manhood, with its witching ardors and exciting but too delusive hopes, stands, flushed with pride and ambition, before us. Real life is in the offing. As yet it opens with brightness and beauty. The gathering clouds show only the silver linings-it is morning, with the sweet breath of spring. But on behind these come other years. The dun level of middle manhood and mature age crowds quick upon the vanishing hold of youth. Now life is real and earnest. Sorrows and cares and labors flood all the moments to their brim and heartaches and weariness come with the morning and thicken to the evening. The great, hard world, with its manifold evils, and the stormy eternity, with its terrors, open upon the gaze of the immortal spirit. The struggle is brief. Death strikes: one part of a life has been lived-the greater part remains. Such is the outline of each human history. To one there is more of evil, to another more of good; but the story is the same. Among these lives comes occasionally one of more than ordinary beauty, and men love to gaze on it and linger over it. It is the charm of the genera |