n "The Bright and the Morning Star," can reproduce in their mind
its tones and refrain. The thoughts of such men--so rare, so apt to be
unvisited and unvalued--often bring into my mind a spring of pure water
I once saw near the top of Cairngorm; always the same, cool in summer,
keeping its few plants alive and happy with its warm breath in winter,
floods and droughts never making its pulse change; and all this because
it came from the interior heights, and was distilled by nature's own
cunning, and had taken its time--was indeed a well of living water. And
with Dr. Henderson this of the mountain holds curiously; he was retired,
but not concealed; and he was of the primary formation, he had no
_organic remains_ of other men in him; he liked and fed on all manner of
literature; knew poetry well; but it was all outside of him; his
thoughts were essentially his own.

He was peculiarly a preacher for preachers, as Spenser is a poet for
poets. They felt he was a master. He published, after the entreaties of
years, a volume of sermons which has long been out of print, and which
he would never prepare for a second edition; he had much too little of
the love of fame, and though not destitute of self-reliance and
self-value, and resolved and unchangeable to obstinacy, he was not in
the least degree vain.

But you will think I am writing more about my father's friends and
myself than about him. In a certain sense we may know a man by his
friends; a man chooses his friends from harmony, not from sameness, just
as we would rather sing in parts than all sing the air. One man fits
into the mind of another not by meeting his points, but by dovetailing;
each finds in the other what he in a double sense wants. This was true
of my father's friends. Dr. Balmer was like him in much more than
perhaps any,--in love of books and lonely study, in his general views of
divine truth, and in their metaphysical and literary likings, but they
differed deeply. Dr. Balmer was serene and just rather than subtle and
profound; his was the still, translucent stream,--my father's the rapid,
and it might be deep; on the one you could safely sail, the other
hurried you on, and yet never were two men, during a long life of
intimate intercourse, more cordial.

I must close the list; one only and the best--the most endeared of them
all--Dr. Heugh. He was, in mental constitution and temper, perhaps more
unlike my father than any of the others I have mentioned.