es, and that for several days together, and at other
times studying intensely when work was less pressing. Thirty years
after, that same man sat in the richest private library in Boston,
working habitually from twelve to seventeen hours a day in severer
toil. The interval was crowded with labors, with acquisitions, with
reproaches, with victories, with honors; and he who experienced all
this died exhausted at the end of it, less than fifty years old, but
looking seventy. That man was Theodore Parker.

The time is far distant when out of a hundred different statements of
contemporaries some calm biographer will extract sufficient materials
for a true picture of the man; and meanwhile all that each can do is
to give fearlessly his own honest impressions, and so tempt others to
give theirs. Of the multitude of different photographers, each
perchance may catch some one trait without which the whole portraiture
would have remained incomplete; and the time to secure this is now,
while his features are fresh in our minds. It is a daring effort, but
it needs to be made.

Yet Theodore Parker was so strong and self-sufficing upon his own
ground, he needed so little from any other, while giving so freely to
all, that one would hardly venture to add anything to the
autobiographies he has left, but for the high example he set of
fearlessness in dealing with the dead. There may be some whose fame is
so ill-established, that one shrinks from speaking of them precisely
as one saw them; but this man's place is secure, and that friend best
praises him who paints him just as he seemed. To depict him as he
_was_ must be the work of many men, and no single observer, however
intimate, need attempt it.

The first thing that strikes an observer, in listening to the words of
public and private feeling elicited by his departure, is the
predominance in them all of the sentiment of love. His services, his
speculations, his contests, his copious eloquence, his many languages,
these come in as secondary things, but the predominant testimony is
emotional. Men mourn the friend even more than the warrior. No fragile
and lovely girl, fading untimely into heaven, was ever more
passionately beloved than this white-haired and world-weary man. As he
sat in his library, during his lifetime, he was not only the awakener
of a thousand intellects, but the centre of a thousand hearts;--he
furnished the natural home for every foreign refugee, every hunted
sla