There must be, I fear, now and then an apparent discrepancy between you and me, especially as to the degree of mental depression which at times overshadowed my father's nature. You will understand this, and I hope our readers will make allowance for it. Some of it is owing to my constitutional tendency to overstate, and much of it to my having had perhaps more frequent, and even more private, insights into this part of his life. But such inconsistency as that I speak of the co-existence of a clear, firm faith, a habitual sense of God and of his infinite mercy, the living a life of faith, as if it was in his organic and inner life, more than in his sensational and outward is quite compatible with that tendency to distrust himself, that bodily darkness and mournfulness, which at times came over him. Any one who knows "what a piece of work is man;" how composite, how varying, how inconsistent human nature is, that each of us is "Some twenty several men, all in an hour," - will not need to be told to expect, or how to harmonize, these differences of mood. You see this in that wonderful man, the apostle Paul, the true typical fulness, the humanness, so to speak, of whose nature comes out in such expressions of opposites as these - "By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things." I cannot, and after your impressive and exact history of his last days, I need not say anything of the close of those long years of suffering, active and passive, and that slow ebbing of life; the body, without help or hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind mourning for its suffering friend, companion, and servant, mourning also, sometimes, that it must be "unclothed," and take its flight all alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever, or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the mind calm and clear, and the body conscious of its own decay, - dying, as it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were obliged to leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy" had already begun its reign - when he knew us, and that was all, and when he followed us with his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak the end came; and then, as through life, his will asserted itself supreme in death. With that love of order and decency which was a law of his life, he deliberately composed himself, placing his body at rest, as if setting his house in order before leaving it, and then closed his eyes and mouth, so that his last look the look his body carried to the grave and faced dissolution in - was that of sweet, dignified selfpossession. I have made this letter much too long, and have said many things in it I never intended saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be able to say. But I must end. Yours ever affectionately, J. BROWN. "He was not one man, he was a thousand men." - SYDNEY SMITH. WHEN, towards the close of some long summer day, we come suddenly, and, as we think, before his time, upon the broad sun, "sinking down in his tranquillity" into the unclouded west; we cannot keep our eyes from the great spectacle; and when he is gone, the shadow of him haunts our sight with the spectre of his brightness, which is dark when our eyes are open; luminous when they are shut: we see everywhere, upon the spotless heaven, upon the distant mountains, upon the fields, and upon the road at our feet, that dim, strange, changeful image; and if our eyes shut, to recover themselves, we still find in them, like a dying flame, or like a gleam in a dark place, the unmistakable phantom of the mighty orb that has set, and were we to sit down, as we have often done, and try to record by pencil or by pen, our impression of that supreme hour, still would it be there. We must have patience with our eye, it will not let the impression go, that spot on which the radiant disc was impressed, is insensible to all other outward things, for a time: its best relief is, to let the eye wander vaguely over earth and sky, and repose itself on the mild shadowy distance. So it is when a great and good and beloved man departs, sets it may be suddenly - and to us who know not the times and the seasons, too soon. We gaze eagerly at his last hours, and when he is gone, never to rise again on our sight, we see his image wherever we go, and in whatsoever we are engaged, and if we try to record by words our wonder, our sorrow, and our affection, we cannot see to do it, for the "idea of his life" is for ever coming into our "study of imagination" into all our thoughts, and we can do little else than let our mind, in a wise passiveness, hush itself to rest. The sun returns - he knows his rising — "To-morrow he repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore but man lieth down, and riseth not again till the heavens are no more. Never again will he whose "Meditations" are now before us, lift up the light of his countenance upon us. We need not say we look upon him as a great man, as a good man, as a beloved man quis desiderio sit pudor tam cari capitis? We cannot now go very curiously to work, to scrutinize the composition of his character, - we cannot take that large, free, genial nature to pieces, and weigh this and measure that, and sum up and pronounce; we are too near as yet to him, and to his loss, he is too dear to us to be so handled. "His death," to use the pathetic words of Hartley Coleridge, "is a recent sorrow; his image still lives in eyes that weep for him." The prevailing feeling is, - He is gone "abiit ad plures he has gone over to the majority, he has joined the famous nations of the dead." --- It is no small loss to the world, when one of its master spirits - one of its great lights - a king among the nations →→→ leaves it. A sun is extinguished; a great attractive, regulating power is withdrawn. For though it be a common, it is also a natural thought, to compare a great man to the sun; it is in many respects significant. Like the sun, he rules his day, and he is "for a sign and for seasons, and for days and for years;" he enlightens, quickens, attracts, and leads after him his host – his generation. he rises running To pursue our image. When the sun sets to us, elsewhere he goes on rejoicing, like a strong man, his race. So does a great man: when he leaves us and our concerns - he rises elsewhere; and we may reasonably suppose that one who has in this world played a great part in its greatest histories who has through a long life been preeminent for promoting the good of men and the glory of God will be looked upon with keen interest, when he joins the company of the immortals. They must have heard of his fame; they may in their ways have seen and helped him already. Every one must have trembled when reading that passage in Isaiah, in which Hell is described as moved to meet Lucifer at his coming: there is not in human language anything more sublime of conception, more exquisite in expression; it has on it the light of the terrible crystal. But may we not reverse the scene? May we not imagine, when a great and good man a son of the morning — enters on his rest, that Heaven would move itself to meet him at his coming? that it would stir up its dead, even all the chief ones of the earth, and that the kings of the nations would arise each one from his throne to welcome their brother? that those who saw him would "narrowly consider him," and say, "Is this he who moved nations, enlightened and bettered his fellows, and whom the great Taskmaster welcomes with 'Well done!'" We cannot help following him, whose loss we now mourn, |