notions on such a variety of subjects. He was perfectly willing that
churches (being himself a member), and Sunday-schools, and missionary
enterprises should go on; in fact, I do not believe he ever opposed
anything in his life. No one was more willing to vote town taxes and
road-repairs and schoolhouses than he. If you could call him spirited at
all, he was public-spirited.

And with all this he was never very well; he had, from boyhood, "enjoyed
poor health." You would say he was not a man who would ever catch
anything, not even an epidemic; but he was a person whom diseases would
be likely to overtake, even the slowest of slow fevers. And he was n't
a man to shake off anything. And yet sickness seemed to trouble him no
more than poverty. He was not discontented; he never grumbled. I am not
sure but he relished a "spell of sickness" in haying-time.

An admirably balanced man, who accepts the world as it is, and evidently
lives on the experience of others. I have never seen a man with less
envy, or more cheerfulness, or so contented with as little reason for
being so. The only drawback to his future is that rest beyond the grave
will not be much change for him, and he has no works to follow him.

III

This Yankee philosopher, who, without being a Brahmin, had, in an
uncongenial atmosphere, reached the perfect condition of Nirvina,
reminded us all of the ancient sages; and we queried whether a world
that could produce such as he, and could, beside, lengthen a man's years
to one hundred and thirteen, could fairly be called an old and
worn-out world, having long passed the stage of its primeval poetry and
simplicity. Many an Eastern dervish has, I think, got immortality
upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary sojourner in
Massachusetts. It is a common notion that the world (meaning the people
in it) has become tame and commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and
epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his argumentative way, dissents from
this entirely. He says that the world is more complex, varied, and a
thousand times as interesting as it was in what we call its youth, and
that it is as fresh, as individual and capable of producing odd and
eccentric characters as ever. He thought the creative vim had not in any
degree abated, that both the types of men and of nations are as sharply
stamped and defined as ever they were.

Was there ever, he said, in the past, any figure more clearly cut and
fresh