"Of the several qualities,--the wakefulness, precision, fullness, equipoise, and docility--that form, in other words, the motion, edge, weight, balance, and direction of the forged and tempered intellect,--I might give many instances. Such men as Thomas Arnold and Mr. Gladstone instantly rise to the thoughts,--the one by his truth-seeking and truth-finding spirit moulding a generation of English scholars, the other carrying by the sheer force of his clear-cut intellect and magnanimous soul the sympathies of a great nation and the admiration of Christendom. But let me rather single out one name from the land of specialties and limitations,--Barthold George Niebuhr, the statesman and historian. Not perfect, indeed, but admirable. See him begin in his early youth by saying,--'I do not ask myself whether I can do a thing; I command myself to do it.' Read the singular sketch of his intellectual gymnastics at twenty-one, spurring himself to 'inward deep voluntary thought,' 'guarding against society and dissipation,' devoting an hour each day to clearing up his thoughts on given subjects, and two hours to the round of physical sciences; exacting of himself 'an extensive knowledge of the facts' of science and history; holding himself alike accountable for minute 'description,' 'accurate definitions,' 'general laws,' 'deep reflection,' and 'distinct consciousness of the rules of my moral being,' together with what he calls the holy resolve--'more and more to purify my soul, so that it may be ready at all times to return to the eternal source.' How intensely he toiled to counteract a certain conscious German one-sidedness of mind, visiting England to study all the varied phenomena of its robust life, and yet writing home from London, at twenty-two,--'I positively shrink from associating with the young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness.' His memory, not inferior to that of Macaulay or Scaliger, he made strictly the servant of his thinking. Amid all the speculative tendencies of Germany, he became a man of facts and affairs. Overflowing with details, he probed the facts of history to the quick, and felt for its heart. Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as 'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the _verified_ quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to 'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness and colossal egoism of his later career. In the midst of public honors he valued more than all his delightful home and literary life, and his motto was _Tecum habita_. Surrounded by Pyrrhonism, and bent by the nature of his studies toward skeptical habits, how grandly he