“They chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone; The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own; The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone, Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her, Ye left her there alone! “My Beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy pain; The night that hath no morrow was brooding on the main; But lo! a light is breaking, of hope for thee again; ’Tis Perseus’ sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day proclaiming, Across the Western main. O Ireland! O my country! he comes to break thy chain.” GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. In the footsore journey through Mexico, when dinner gladdened our vision, poor Read would solemnly remark, “dinners are reverent things.” Society accepted this definition. I use society in the sense that Emerson would. “When one meets his mate,” writes the Concord sage, “society begins.” Read was mine, and to-day his quaint remark haunts me with melancholy force. Thoughts of a dinner with the subject of this sketch, George Parsons Lathrop, and one whose fair and forceful life has been quenched, flit through my mind. It was but yesterday that I bade the gentle scholar farewell, unconsciously a long farewell, for Azarias has fled from the haunts of mortality. “This is the burden of the heart, The burden that it always bore; We live to love, we meet to part, And part to meet on earth no more.” Colonel Johnson had read one of his charming essays. Brother Azarias and George Parsons Lathrop had listened with rapt attention to the most loveable writer of the New South. After the lecture I was asked to join them, for, as the author of Lucille asks, “where is the man that can live without dining?” That dinner, now that one lies dead, enters my memory as reverent and makes of Read’s remark a truth. Men may or may not appear best at dinner. Circumstances lord over most dinners. As it was the only opportunity I had to snap my kodak, you must accept my picture or seek a better artist. Kodak-pictures, when taken by amateurs, are generally blurred. And now to mine. A man of medium height, strongly built, broad shouldered, the whole frame betokening agility; face somewhat rounded giving it a pleasant plumpness, with eyes quick, nervous and snappy, lighting up a more than ordinary dark complexion—such is Parsons Lathrop, as caught by my camera. His voice was soft, clear as a bell-note, and, when heard in a lecture hall, charming; a slight hesitancy but adds to the pleasure of the listener. In reading he affects none of the dramatic poses and Delsarte movements that makes unconscious comedians of our tragic-readers. It is pleasant to listen to such a man, having no fear that in some moving passage, carried away by some quasi-involuntary elocutionary movement, he might find himself a wreck among the audience. The lines of Wordsworth are an apt description of him: