more weighty and influential, because more sympathetic and more intelligent.

Let me illustrate once more, by an example, what I mean by positiveness and enthusiasm and by disregard of self and of the weak dread of being ridiculous. You have all, no doubt, read the novels and sketches of Mr. Cable. You know that he is one of the most charming of our younger writers. Mr. Cable has lately turned aside to enter another field, and to do what in him lies to right what he believed to be a wrong. I suppose that every one who listens to me has read the two essays entitled "The Freedman's Case in Equity" and "The Silent South." The modest volume which contains them is, I believe, an epoch-making book. Not now, perhaps, but in the days that are yet to be. These essays are written of course admirably, with literary skill and great force. The words, however, are not so much; the great fact is the man who uttered them. It is the act that will live, and which is destined to mark a stage in our national development. Mr. Cable is the grandson and son of a slaveholder. He was a soldier in the Confederate army. He is a Southerner through and through, with all the traditions and prejudices of the South. He saw before him a despised race just released from slavery; he saw that the condition of that race presented a mighty problem, vital to the welfare of a large part of our common country. He believed that this problem was one which legislation could not reach, but which public opinion in the South could alone deal with. He studied the question, and came to the conclusion that the treatment of the negro was neither right nor honest. How easy it was to remain silent! He had everything to gain and nothing to lose by silence, and he thereupon spoke out. He faced hostility, ostracism almost, at the South, and indifference at the North. was assailed, abused, and sneered at, but he has never been answered, and he never will be answered until he obtains from the tribunal to which he appealed, from Southern. opinion itself, the inevitable verdict that he is right and that the wrong shall be redressed.

He

It was a great and noble act. It was positive and not negative. Mr. Cable will be remembered for those essays. while we have a history, and long after the very names

of those who stood coldly by and criticised him have been forgotten.

It is by such men that the work of the world is done, and every man can do his part, be it great or small, if he rests on the same everlasting principle. The terrors, the mistakes, the failures, the ridicule, will be forgotten, but the central, animating thought, manly, robust, and generous, will survive. Be in sympathy with your time and your country. Be positive, not negative. Live the life of your time, if you would live at all. These are generalities, I know, but they mean everything to me because they define a mental and moral attitude which is essential to virility and well-doing. Let that attitude be right, and the man upon whom fortune has betsowed the gift of leisure will become, as he ought, one of the most useful and one of the busiest of men. If he is this, the rest will care

for itself.

"In light things

Prove thou the arms thou long'st to glorify,

Nor fear to work up from the lowest ranks,

Whence come great nature's captains. And high deeds
Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight,

But the pell-mell of men."

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW

WASHINGTON IRVING

[Address by Henry W. Longfellow, poet (born in Portland, Me., February 27, 1807; died in Cambridge, Mass., March 24, 1882), delivered in Boston, December 15, 1859, at a memorial meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society called for the purpose of taking action on the death of Washington Irving.]

Every reader has his first book. I mean to say, one book among all others, which in early youth first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me this first book was the "Sketch Book" of Washington Irving. I was a schoolboy when it was published, and read each succeeding number with ever-increasing wonder and delight; spellbound by its pleasant humor, its melancholy tenderness, its atmosphere of reverie, nay, even by its gray-brown covers, the shaded letters of the titles, and the fair, clear type, which seemed an outward symbol of the style.

How many delightful books the same author has given us, written before and since-volumes of history and fiction, most of which illustrate his native land, and some of which illumine it, and make the Hudson, I will not say as classic, but as romantic as the Rhine! Yet still the charm of the "Sketch Book" remains unbroken; the old fascination still lingers about it; and whenever I open its pages, I open also that mysterious door which leads back into the haunted chambers of youth.

Many years afterwards I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Irving in Spain, and found the author, whom I had loved, repeated in the man. The same playful humor; the same touches of sentiment; the same poetic atmos

phere; and, what I admired still more, the entire absence of all literary jealousy, of all that mean avarice of fame, which counts what is given to another as so much taken from one's self

"And rustling hears in every breeze,

The laurels of Miltiades."

At this time Mr. Irving was at Madrid, engaged upon his "Life of Columbus "; and if the work itself did not bear ample testimony to his zealous and conscientious labor, I could do so from personal observation. He seemed to be always at work. "Sit down," he would say; "I will talk with you in a moment, but I must first finish this sentence."

One summer morning, passing his house at the early hour of six, I saw his study window already wide open. On my mentioning it to him afterwards, he said: "Yes, I am always at my work as early as six." Since then I have often remembered that sunny morning and that open window, so suggestive of his sunny temperament and his open heart, and equally so of his patient and persistent toil; and have recalled those striking words of Dante:

Seggendo in piuma,

In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre:

Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma,

Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia,

Qual fumo in aere, od in acqua la schiuma,"

"Seated upon down,

Or in his bed, man cometh not to fame,
Withouten which, whoso his life consumes,
Such vestige of himself on earth shall leave,
As smoke in air, and in the water foam."

Remembering these things, I esteem it a great though a melancholy privilege to lay upon his hearse the passing tribute of these resolutions:

Resolved, That while we deeply deplore the death of our friend and associate, Washington Irving, we rejoice in the completeness of his life and labors, which, closing together, have left behind them so sweet a fame, and a memory so precious.

Resolved, That we feel a just pride in his renown as an author, not forgetting that, to his other claims upon our gratitude, he adds also that of having been the first to win for our country an honorable name and position in the History of Letters.

Resolved, That we hold in affectionate remembrance the noble example of his long literary career, extending through half a century of unremitted labors, graced with all the amenities of authorship, and marred by none of its discords and contentions.

Resolved, That as members of this Historical Society, we regard with especial honor and admiration his Lives of Columbus, the Discoverer, and of Washington, the Father of our Country.