saintly Ellery Channing; courtly Edward Everett; soaring Emerson; sledge-hammer Beecher, _père_; Parker, the New England Luther; golden-mouthed Starr King; mystic, Oriental Weiss; Freeman Clarke--steady old “Saint James”; Father Taylor, the Only; quaint, erratic Bartol, the last of the Transcendentalists; impetuous Phillips Brooks; and manly, practical Everett Hale. Can you measure the light they have spread around--its range, its brilliancy? The Christian pulpit of Boston has been a diadem of light to half the world. It has been distinctively not an ecclesiastical, but a patriotic, educational, and intellectual force. Yet, out of the whole cluster of preacher-authors, one can strictly claim for literature only our American Kingsley--Edward Everett Hale. It is not so much by warrant of his studies in Spanish history that we class him among the _literati_--although in some degree he has proved the successor of Prescott in this field, and has lately prepared “The Story of Spain” for Putnam’s Nations Series; but it is in virtue of his novels, his help-stories for young folks, and his books of travel. Mr. Hale’s home is in Roxbury (the “Highland” region), five-minutes’ ride, by steam car, from the heart of Boston. “Rocksbury,” as it was spelled in the old documents, is a rocky and craggy place, as its name indicates. If you are curious to know where the rocks came from, just turn to Dr. Holmes’s “Dorchester Giant,” and read about that plum-pudding, as big as the State House dome, which was demolished by the giant’s wife and screaming boys: “They flung it over to Roxbury hills, They flung it over the plain, And all over Milton and Dorchester too Great lumps of pudding the giants threw; They tumbled as thick as rain.”