tate, sed etiam opportunitate mortis!_ dying with his lamp burning,
his passport made out for his journey; death an instant act, not a
prolonged process of months, as with his friend.

I have called Dr. Henderson a remarkable man, and an exquisite preacher;
he was both, in the strict senses of the words. He had the largest brain
I ever saw or measured. His hat had to be made for him; and his head was
great in the nobler regions; the anterior and upper were full, indeed
immense. If the base of his brain and his physical organization,
especially his circulating system, had been in proportion, he would have
been a man of formidable power, but his defective throb of the heart,
and a certain lentitude of temperament, made this impossible; and his
enormous organ of thought and feeling, being thus shut from the outlet
of active energy, became intensely _meditative_, more this than even
reflective. The consequence was, in all his thoughts an exquisiteness
and finish, a crystalline lustre, purity and concentration; but it was
the exquisiteness of a great nature. If the first edge was fine, it was
the sharp end of the wedge, the broad end of which you never reached,
but might infer. This gave _momentum_ to everything he said. He was in
the true sense what Chalmers used to call a "man of _wecht_." His mind
acted by its sheer absolute power; it seldom made an effort; it was the
hydraulic pressure, harmless, manageable, but irresistible; not the
perilous compression of steam. Therefore it was that he was untroubled
and calm, though rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull;
"strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of
water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His
language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent
medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a
pebble brings out its lines and color. That lovely, and by him
much-loved river was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great,
strong, with a prevailing mild seriousness all along its course, but
clear and quiet; sometimes, as at old Melrose, turning upon itself,
reflecting, losing itself in beauty, and careless to go, deep and
inscrutable, but stealing away cheerily down to Lessudden, all the
clearer of its rest; and then again at the Trows, showing unmistakably
its power in removing obstructions and taking its own way, and chafing
nobly with the rocks, sometimes, too, like h