beginning to understand this. We are beginning to see that a devotion
to the business of life which leaves no reserve of force and time for
social pleasures and the pursuit of knowledge, diminishes even our
power to conduct business with the sustained and intelligent energy
requisite for a safe success. That is a melancholy passage in one of
Theodore Parker's letters, written in the premature decline of his
powers, in which he laments that he had not, like Franklin, joined a
club, and taken an occasional ramble with young companions in the
country, and played billiards with them in the evening. He added, that
he intended to lead a better life in these particulars for the future;
but who can reform at forty-seven? And the worst of it is, that
ill-health, the natural ally of all evil, favors intensity, lessening
both our power and our inclination to get out of the routine that is
destroying us. Goodyear, always sick, had been for so many years the
slave of his pursuit, he had been so spurred on by necessity, and
lured by partial success, that, when at last he might have rested, he
could not.

It does not become us, however, who reap the harvest, to censure him
who wore himself out in sowing the seed. The harvest is
great,--greater than any but he anticipated. His friends know now that
he never over-estimated the value of his invention. They know now what
he meant when he said that no one but himself would take the trouble
to apply his material to the thousand uses of which it was capable,
because each new application demanded a course of experiments that
would discourage any one who entered upon it only with a view to
profit. The India-rubber manufacture, since his death, has increased
greatly in extent, but not much in other respects, and some of the
ideas which he valued most remain undeveloped. He died, for example,
in the conviction that sails of India-rubber cloth would finally
supersede all others. He spent six months and five thousand dollars in
producing one or two specimens, which were tried and answered their
purpose well; but he was unable to bring his sail-making process to an
available perfection. The sole difficulty was to make his sails as
light as those of cloth. He felt certain of being able to accomplish
this; but in the multiplicity of his objects and the pressure of his
embarrassments, he was compelled to defer the completion of his plans
to a day that never came.

The catalogue of his successful eff