This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him. They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war. Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent. It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches; to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense--this was not easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better; and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more music! Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the remembered voice. "Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"