This is no place for eulogy and panegyric. My task has been just to
trace the portrait of my friend as he appeared to others; his own words
shall reveal the inner spirit. The beauty of the life to me was that he
attained, unconsciously and gradually, to the very virtues which he
most desired and in which he felt himself to be most deficient. He had
to bear a series of devastating calamities. He had loved the warmth and
nearness of his home circle more deeply than most men, and the whole of
it was swept away; he had depended for stimulus and occupation alike
upon his artistic work, and the power was taken from him at the moment
of his highest achievement. His loss of fortune is not to be reckoned
among his calamities, because it was no calamity to him. He ended by
finding a richer treasure than any that he had set out to obtain; and I
remember that he said to me once, not long before his end, that
whatever others might feel about their own lives, he could not for a
moment doubt that his own had been an education of a deliberate and
loving kind, and that the day when he realised that, when he saw that
there was not a single incident in his life that had not a deep and an
intentional value for him, was one of the happiest days of his whole
existence. I do not know that he expected anything or speculated on
what might await him hereafter; he put his future, just as he put his
past and his present, in the hands of God, to Whom he committed himself
"as unto a faithful Creator."
THE ALTAR FIRE
September 8, 1888.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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