No one who ever heard John B. Gough can forget his marvelous eloquence, his wit and his pathos, his scintillating humor, his inimitable dramatisms. He did not have the polished brilliancy of Everett or the elegant scholarship of Phillips, and yet when these numbered thousands of admirers, Gough numbered his tens of thousands. In his autobiography this man tells us to what sad straits passion had brought him; how he reflected upon the injury he was doing himself and others, only to find that his reflections and resolutions snapped like cobwebs before the onslaught of temptation. One night the young bookbinder drifted into a little meeting and, buttoning his seedy overcoat to conceal his rags, in some way he found himself upon his feet and began to speak. The address that proved a pleasure to others was a revelation to himself. For the first time Gough tasted the joys of moving men and mastering them for good. Within a week that love of public speech and useful service had kindled his mental faculties into a creative glow. The new and higher love of the heart consumed the lower love of the body, just as the sun melts manacles of ice from a man's wrist. History is full of these transformations wrought by the heart. It was a new enthusiasm that changed Augustine the epicurean into Augustine the church father. It was a new enthusiasm that turned Howard the pleasure-lover into Howard the prison-reformer. It was a glowing heart that lent power to Mazzini and Garibaldi and gave Italy her new hope and liberty. Indeed, the history of each life is the history of its new loves. The enthusiasms are beacon lights that glow in the highway along which the soul journeys forward. When the hero's ships were becalmed Virgil tells us that Aeolus struck the hollow mountain with his staff and straightway, released from their caves, the winds went forth to stir the waves and smite upon the sails and sweep the becalmed ship on toward its harbor. Oh, beautiful story, telling us how Christ touches the heart with his regenerating hand to release the soul's deeper convictions, to sweep man forward to the heavenly haven! If sentiment working in sound can make music; if working in colors, etc., it can fill galleries with statues and pictures; if sentiment working in literature can produce poems, it should not seem strange that the heart, with its affections, furnishes the key of knowledge and wisdom. The time was when authors were supposed to think out their truths; now we know that the greatest truths are felt out. Matthew Arnold said that mere knowledge is cold as an icicle, but once experienced and touched with noble feelings truth becomes sweetness and light. This author thought that the first requisite for a good writer was a sensitive and sympathetic heart.