It is no answer to say that the victims of intellectual toil, broken down in health or fortune, have counted their work, a privilege and joy. As well deny the martyr's sacrifice, because he has joyed in his integrity. And many of the world's intellectual benefactors, have been martyrs. Socrates died in prison, as a public malefactor; for the healing wisdom he offered his people, deadly poison was the reward. Homer had a lot so obscure, at least, that nobody knew his birthplace; and indeed some modern critics are denying that there ever was any Homer. Plato travelled back and forth from his home in Athens to the court of the Syracusan tyrant, regarded indeed and feared, but persecuted and in peril of life; nay, and once sold for a slave. Cicero shared a worse fate. Dante, all his life knew, as he expressed it,-- "How salt was a stranger's bread, How hard the path still up and down to tread, A stranger's stairs." Copernicus and Galileo found science no more profitable than Dante found poetry. Shakspeare had a home; but too poorly endowed to stand long in his name, after he left it; the income upon which he retired was barely two or three hundred pounds a year; and so little did his contemporaries know or think of him, that the critics hunt in vain for the details of his private life. "The mighty space of his large honors," shrinks to an obscure myth of a life in theatres of London or on the banks of the Avon. I might go on to speak, but it needs not, of the noble philanthropists and missionaries, often spoken of lightly in these days, because what is noblest must endure the severest criticism; of inventors, seldom rewarded for their sagacity and the immense benefits they have conferred upon the world; of soldiers, our own especially, buried by thousands, in unknown graves--green, would we fain say, green forever be the mounds that cover them! Let processions of men and women and children, every year, bring flowers, bring garlands of honor, to their lowly tombs! But there is another form of self-consecration which is yet more essential, and which is universal. And yet _because_ it is essential and universal, the very life-spring of the world's growth; because it is no signal benefit, but the common blessing of our existence; because it moulds our unconscious infancy, and mingles with our thoughtless childhood, and is an incorporate part of our being, it is apt to be overlooked and forgotten. The sap that flows up through the roots of the world--it is out of sight. The stately growths we _see_; the trees that drop balsam and healing upon the nations, we _see_; the schools, the universities, the hospitals, which beneficence has builded, we _see_; but the stream that, through all ages, is flowing from sire to son, is a hidden current.