eath,--you who, with perfect self-possession
and heroic cheerfulness, are counting the last miles of the
voyage,--find leisure to study and think as the boat glides onwards
silently to the inevitable end. It is one of the happiest privileges of
the high intellectual life that it can elevate us--at least in the
intervals of relief from complete prostration or acute pain--to regions
of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten. To
feel that he is still able, even in days of physical weakness and
decline, to add something to the world's inheritance of knowledge, or to
bequeath to it some new and noble thought in the pearl of complete
expression, is a profound satisfaction to the active mind that is lodged
in a perishing body. Many diseases fortunately permit this activity to
the last; and I do not hesitate to affirm, that the work done in the
time of physical decline has in not a few instances been the most
perfect and the most permanently valuable. It is not accurately true
that the mind and the body invariably fail together. Physicians who know
how prevalent chronic diseases are, and how many eminent men are
physically inconvenienced by them, know also that minds of great
spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving
themselves whilst the body steadily deteriorates. Nor is there anything
irrational in this persistent improvement of the mind, even to the
extremest limit of material decay; for the mind of every intellectual
human being is part and parcel of the great permanent mind of humanity;
and even if its influence soon ceases to be traceable--if the spoken
words are forgotten--if the written volume is not reprinted or even
quoted, it has not worked in vain. The intellectual light of Europe in
this century is not only due to great luminaries whom every one can
name, but to millions of thoughtful persons, now utterly forgotten, who
in their time loved the light, and guarded it, and increased it, and
carried it into many lands, and bequeathed it as a sacred trust. He who
labors only for his personal pleasure may well be discouraged by the
shortness and uncertainty of life, and cease from his selfish toil on
the first approaches of disease; but whoever has fully realized the
grand continuity of intellectual tradition, and taken his own place in
it between the future and the past, will work till he can work no more,
and then gaze hopefully on the world's great future, like