f what
he did or said or wrote--not even of what he was as a man of God and a
public teacher; but what he was in his essential nature--what he would
have been had he been anything else than what he was, or had lived a
thousand years ago.

Sometimes I have this so vividly in my mind that I think I have only to
sit down and write it off, and do it to the quick. "The idea of his
life," what he was as a whole, what was his self, all his days,
would,--to go on with words which not time or custom can ever wither or
make stale,--

"Sweetly creep
Into my study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of his life
Would come apparelled in more precious habit--
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of my soul,
Than when he lived indeed,"

as if the sacredness of death and the bloom of eternity were on it; or
as you may have seen in an untroubled lake, the heaven reflected with
its clouds, brighter, purer, more exquisite than itself; but when you
try to put this into words, to detain yourself over it, it is by this
very act disturbed, broken and bedimmed, and soon vanishes away, as
would the imaged heavens in the lake, if a pebble were cast into it, or
a breath of wind stirred its face. The very anxiety to transfer it, as
it looked out of the clear darkness of the past, makes the image grow
dim and disappear.

Every one whose thoughts are not seldom with the dead, must have felt
both these conditions; how, in certain passive, tranquil states, there
comes up into the darkened chamber of the mind, its "chamber of
imagery"--uncalled, as if it blossomed out of space, exact, absolute,
consummate, vivid, speaking, not darkly as in a glass, but face to face,
and "moving delicate"--this "idea of his life;" and then how an effort
to prolong and perpetuate and record all this, troubles the vision and
kills it! It is as if one should try to paint in a mirror the reflection
of a dear and unseen face; the coarse, uncertain passionate handling and
color, ineffectual and hopeless, shut out the very thing itself.

I will therefore give this up as in vain, and try by some fragmentary
sketches, scenes, and anecdotes, to let you know in some measure what
manner of man my father was. Anecdotes, if true and alive, are always
valuable; the man in the concrete, the _totus quis_ comes out in them;
and I know you too well to think that you will consider as trivial or
out of place anything in