“His voice rose very high and it was altogether the most eloquent effort he has ever made in this pulpit,--and is so conceded by all whom I have spoken with. I never saw Mr. Beecher when he appeared happier and healthier than now. “It had been almost decided to send him away on a six months’ vacation for rest, but he to-day refused to take it, saying that he did not need it and would rather stay at home with his people as ‘they needed his preaching and he needed to preach.’ I am going to call on him soon.” To attempt to enumerate the authors and the artists, the critics and the clergymen, the naturalists and the nature “amateurs” with whom he was on friendly and even intimate terms would be to make a long catalogue of the most eminent men of his time. It would include such names as Stedman and Stoddard, Beard and Murphy, Abbott and Ludlow, Burroughs and Roe and Ellwanger, Parsons and Alden and the Egglestons. His correspondence included men and women from all over the world. His genius appealed to men of all classes and pursuits--to all who had the simple heart of childhood and its open eye. And that genius was so full of the vitality of the individual, so warm with his own personality, that to admire him as artist or naturalist was to be drawn to him as a man. He seemed to come to people as a friendly interpreter and as a helpful friend, unlocking new gates outward into nature’s life, disclosing new horizons, telling new secrets of the Cosmos. The tone of the letters he received from hundreds of unknown admirers shows that he was everywhere held as a personal friend, a teacher who won at once the attention, the admiration, and the love of his disciples. Two letters from correspondents curiously remote from each other are types of the hundreds who were drawn by the human spirit of his writings to ply him with questions, or overwhelm him with appreciation and gratitude. From the confines of civilization on the north to the boundary of the nation on the south, the friends whom he had made by his pencil and his pen, his art and his scientific knowledge, appealed to him with an instinctive feeling that he would understand them, welcome them, help them if he could. Nor were they ever disappointed. The first letter is from bleak Anticosti Island: “THE LIGHTHOUSE, “_South West Point_, “_13th May, 1895_. “DEAR MR. GIBSON: