comprehensive; no label, however broadly and carefully phrased, could adequately describe that subtile and elastic quality of soul which we call his religion By a strange and unerring instinct his mind, with the swiftness of light, seized the inherent and essential truth which forever defines the relation between the human soul and God. He saw that the quality of men's faith is not determined by the form in which it is expressed. Oh, how he tried to overcome and destroy the false issue which for a quarter of a millennium England had been trying to raise between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland! Living in constant daily fellowship with the sons of Pilgrims and Puritans-men who came hither hating the Papacy as the instrument of Satan-he saw the serenity and beauty of their piety, and that they were the very elect of God for the more perfect establishment of His kingdom among men.

He perceived that there is more than one way into the heavenly presence. The poor heathen mother pressing her babe for a moment to her breast in agonized affection before she casts it to the crocodiles to appease the vengeance of her deity, the minister of a Protestant conventicle preaching in harsh and strident tones a divisive gospel, and the indifferent, yet gently charitable sceptic, can all present an offering that

May rise

To heaven and find acceptance there,

no less than he whose petition is borne upward on clouds of incense that float from censers swung by priestly hands before cathedral altars. This cleareyed, tender, transcendent and all-comprehending faith

was the solvent in which provincialism, prejudice, bigotry and vindictiveness vanished utterly and for

ever.

Such in my poor and fragmentary speech was the man whose monument we have reared-the broadestminded and most accomplished Irishman, since Edmund Burke, one of the few rare and transparent souls to whom, out of all the races, the last half of the nineteenth century has decreed an immortality of fame. We place him here in our great Valhalla. The venerable Puritan founders of this glorious commonwealth, the mighty leaders of the revolutionary epoch, the soldiers whose blood moistened and rendered sacred forever the soil of Bunker Hill, the matchless orators and heroes of the anti-slavery reform, the nameless hosts who with the first echoes of Sumter's guns grasped their muskets and marched to the defence of the republic, must all lie a little closer in their graves to make room for this lover of mankind.

Here we set his memorial in the public square, embellished with all the grace and beauty that art can bestow. Let those who go swarming past it day after day, fleeing from the dust and turmoil of the city, seeking the fields and woods beyond, turn their eyes hither, and recall the happy-hearted, sunny soul, to whom the song of birds and the voice of running waters were ever like angels' voices speaking of paradise. Let the disheartened reformer pause here for a moment and hear him say, as it were out of the open heavens:

I know

That when God gives us the clearest light,

He does not touch our eyes with love, but sorrow.

Let the hunted fugitive, speaking in an alien tongue,

or our English speech with an alien accent, set down his knapsack beside these stones, and, remembering the welcome which America gave to this stranger, be assured that here there is room for honest work and patriotic effort whether men are native to the soil or foreign-born. Let him who would serve his country by pen, or speech, or sword, look at these symbols in bronze, and find his patriotism renewed. Let the children of the poor, as they behold this monument, be reminded that it is neither wealth nor station, but honorable service that secures for men under the Stars and Stripes affection and renown. Let the high-bred

youth of the great city, who may be tempted to regard with scorn the poor and lowly, pause and listen before this noble pile, and he will learn the lesson which the rich must learn for safety:

That the bluest blood is putrid blood,
That the people's blood is red.

ton, Mifflin & Company. Reprinted with permission. By RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

THE

HERE goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian,-as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called "practical men" sneer at speculative men, as if because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day,-are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the

last of their pine trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town,-in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the workyard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity-these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.

The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a