ad sunk on her voyage out!' But when I came
to know him, I quickly learned that with him origin was not a matter of
vain pride, but a fact inciting him to all nobleness of thought and
life, and spurring him on to emulate the qualities of his ancestor."

That is to say, he was not a prig, or a snob, but a gentleman. And if he
remembered that he "came over in the Mayflower," it was because he felt
that that circumstance bound him to higher enterprises, to better work,
than other men's. And he believed in his heart, as he wrote in the
opening chapter of "John Brent," that "deeds of the heroic and chivalric
times do not utterly disdain our day. There are men," he continues, "as
ready to gallop for love and strike for love now as in the age of
Amadis." Ay, and for a nobler love than the love of woman--for love of
country, and of liberty--he was ready to strike, and to die.

Ready to do, when the time came; but also--what required a greater
soul--ready to wait in cheerful content till the fitting time should
come. Think of these volumes lying in his desk at home, and he, their
author, going about his daily tasks and pleasures, as hearty and as
unrepining as though no whisper of ambition had ever come to his
soul,--as though he had no slightest desire for the pleasant fame which
a successful book gives to a young man. Think of it, O race of
scribblers, to whom a month in the printer's hands seems a monstrous
delay, and who bore publishers with half-finished manuscripts, as
impatient hens begin, untimely, to cackle before the egg is laid.

That a young man, not thirty-three when he died, should have written
these volumes, so full of life, so full of strange adventure, of wide
reading, telling of such large and thorough knowledge of books and men
and Nature, is a remarkable fact in itself. That he should have let the
manuscripts lie in his desk has probably surprised the world more. But,
much as he wrote, Winthrop, perhaps, always felt that his true life was
not that of the author, but of the actor. He has often told me that it
was a pleasure to write,--probably such a pleasure as it is to an old
tar to spin his yarns. His mind was active, stored with the accumulated
facts of a varied experience. How keen an observer of Nature he was,
those who have read "John Brent" or the "Canoe and Saddle" need not be
told; how appreciative an observer of every-day life, was shown in that
brilliant story which appeared in these pages some ei