ms to me, be the text to be
unfolded in his biography, he was a man of excellent common sense,
with a genius so uncommon that he seemed like an exotic transplanted
from some angelic nursery. His character was so blameless, so
beautiful, that it was rather a standard to judge others by than to
find a place for on the scale of comparison. Looking at life with the
profoundest sense of its infinite significance, he was yet a cheerful
optimist, almost too hopeful, peeping into every cradle to see if it
did not hold a babe with the halo of a new Messiah about it. He
enriched the treasure-house of literature, but, what was far more, he
enlarged the boundaries of thought for the few that followed him, and
the many who never knew, and do not know to-day, what hand it was
which took down their prison walls. He was a preacher who taught that
the religion of humanity included both those of Palestine, nor those
alone, and taught it with such consecrated lips that the narrowest
bigot was ashamed to pray for him, as from a footstool nearer to the
throne. "Hitch your wagon to a star": this was his version of the
divine lesson taught by that holy George Herbert whose words he
loved. Give him whatever place belongs to him in our literature, in
the literature of our language, of the world, but remember this: the
end and aim of his being was to make truth lovely and manhood
valorous, and to bring our daily life nearer and nearer to the
eternal, immortal, invisible.

III

THE HOUSE IN WHICH THE PROFESSOR LIVED[13]

"This is the shortest way," she said, as we came to a corner.

"Then we won't take it," said I. The schoolmistress laughed a little,
and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go around.

[Footnote 13: From Part X of "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table."
Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company.]

We walked around Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. The gray squirrels
were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us
in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of
the burial ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue slate-stone at
its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave
of a young man who was the son of an honorable gentleman, and who died
a hundred years ago and more. Oh, yes, died--with a small triangular
mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where
another young man's rapier had slid through his body; and so he