the finest passages were conceived and uttered in the rapid inspiration of speaking, and but for her admiring intelligence and care, the eloquence, wit, and wisdom, which are here preserved to us, would have faded into air with the last vibration of the preacher's voice.

X

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF DR. FOLLEN

There are two classes of men that have a wide and reformatory influence on the world; who write out their thoughts and sentiments, not in words only, but in things. The one consists of men of great intellectual power, but no special goodness of heart. They see in the "dry light" of the understanding what is false, what wrong, what ludicrous in man's affairs, and expose it to be rejected, to be abhorred or to be laughed at. Their eye is keen and far-reaching in the actual; but their insight is not the deepest, nor does the sphere of their reason include all things of human concern. Of these men you do not ask, What was their character? how did they live in their day and their place? but only, What did they think of this thing and of that? Their lives may have been bad, their motives, both for silence and for speech, may have been ignoble and selfish, and their whole life but a long attempt to build up for themselves a fortune and a name; but that does not mar their influence, except in the narrow sphere of their personal life. The good they do lives after them, the evil sleeps with their buried bones. The world looks on them as half-men, expects from them no wholeness of action, but takes their good gift and first forgives and then forgets their moral obliquity or defects. It is often painful to contemplate such men. The brightness of their intellect leads us to wish for a corresponding beauty on their moral side. If a man's wisdom does not

show itself in his works, if his light does not become his life, making his pathway radiant; why, our moral anticipation is disappointed, and we turn away in sadness. Men of a giant's mind and a pigmy's heart; men capable of spanning the heavens, of fathoming the depths of all human science, of mounting with vigorous and untiring pinions above the roar of the crowd and the prejudice of the schools, and continuing their flight before the admiring eyes of lesser men till distance and loftiness swallows them up; men who bring back from their adventurous voyagings new discoveries for human wonder, new truths for daily use; men, too, that with all this wondrous endowment of intellect are yet capable of vanity, selfish ambition, and the thousand little arts which make up the accomplished worldling, such men are a sore puzzle to the young and enthusiastic moralist. "What," he says, "is God unjust? Shall the man whose eye is ever on himself, keen as the eagle's to look for his own profit, yet dull as the blindworm's or the beetle's to the shadows of wrong in his own bosom, shall he be gifted with this faculty to pierce the mystic curtains of nature, and see clearly in his ignoble life where the saint groped for the wall and fell, not seeing?" Such is the fact, often as he may attempt to disguise it. The world, past and present, furnishes us with proofs that cannot be winked out of sight. Men capable of noble and reformatory thought, who lack the accomplishment of goodness and a moral life — we need not pause to point out men of this character, both present and departed; that would be an ungrateful work, one not needed to be done.

The other class is made up of men of moral powers. Their mental ability may be small or great, but their

goodness is the most striking, and the fundamental thing. They may not look over a large field, nor be conversant with all the nooks and crevices of this wondrous world, where science each day brings some new miracle to light; but in the sphere of morals they see as no others. Fast as thought comes to them it turns into action; what was at first but light, elementary and cold, is soon transformed into life, which multiplies itself and its blessings. These men look with a single eye to the everlasting right. To them God's law is a law to be kept, come present weal or present woe. They ask not, What shall accrue to me, or praise or blame? But contentedly they do the work of righteousness their hands find to do, and this with all their might. They live faster than they see, for with a true moral man the spontaneous runs before the reflective, as John outran Peter in seeking the risen Son of Man. When these men have but humble minds they are worthy of deep homage from all mankind. In solitude and in silence, seen by no eye but the All-seeing, they plant with many and hopeful prayers the seed that is one day to spread wide its branches, laden with all manner of fruit, its very leaves for the healing of the nations. How often has it happened that some woman, uncouth, not well bred, and with but little of mind, has kindled in some boy's bosom a love of right, a sense of the sweetness of charity, of the beauty of religion, which grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength, and at last towered forth, strong and flame-like, in the moral heroism of a man whom heaven employs to stir the world and help God's kingdom come! It was only a raven which the boys, resting at noon-day beside the brook Cherith, saw slowly flying towards the moun

tain. But he bore in his beak food for the fainting prophet, the last of the faithful.

When this moral power is found with great intellectual gifts, as it sometimes is, then have we the fairest form of humanity, the mind of a giant, and an angel's heart. These act, each on each. The quickening sentiment fires the thought; this gives strength again to the feelings. The eye is single, the whole body is full of light. The intellect of such an one attracts admiration, his moral excellence enforces love. He teaches by his words of wisdom, by his works of goodness. Happy is the age that beholds a conjunction so rare and auspicious as that of eminent genius, and moral excellence as eminent. A single man of that stamp gives character to the age, a new epoch is begun. Men are forced to call themselves after his name, and that may be said of him which was said of Elias the prophet, "After his death his body prophesied." But such are the rarest sons of God.

Dr. Follen belonged to the class of men that act on the world by their moral power. Certainly it was that which was most conspicuous in him, in his countenance, his writings, his life. Some live for study; their books, both what they read and what they write, are their life; and others for action. They write their soul out in works; their name may perish, their usefulness remains, and widens and deepens till time and the human race shall cease to be. Dr. Follen belonged to the class, then, of men of moral action. In saying this we do not mean to imply that there was little of intellectual force, only that the moral power cast it into the shade; not that he could not have been eminent in the empire of abstract thought, but only that he chose the broad realm of benevolent