The stars gradually came out of the
cool, clear heavens, until they filled them with their sparkling
multitudes. For every star we seemed to have a lively and pleasurable
thought, which came out and ran among our talk, a thread of light.
When we looked at the hour, as we sat fresh and wakeful, warming at
our English inn in St. John's, it was after midnight.
* * * * *
THEODORE PARKER.
"Sir Launcelot! ther thou lyest; thou were never matched of none
earthly knights hands; thou were the truest freende to thy lover
that ever bestrood horse; and thou were the kindest man that ever
strooke with sword; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortall
foe that ever put spere in the rest." _La Morte d'Arthur._
In the year 1828 there was a young man of eighteen at work upon a farm
in Lexington, performing bodily labor to the extent of twenty hours in
a day sometimes, and that for several days together, and at other
times studying intensely when work was less pressing. Thirty years
after, that same man sat in the richest private library in Boston,
working habitually from twelve to seventeen hours a day in severer
toil. The interval was crowded with labors, with acquisitions, with
reproaches, with victories, with honors; and he who experienced all
this died exhausted at the end of it, less than fifty years old, but
looking seventy. That man was Theodore Parker.
The time is far distant when out of a hundred different statements of
contemporaries some calm biographer will extract sufficient materials
for a true picture of the man; and meanwhile all that each can do is
to give fearlessly his own honest impressions, and so tempt others to
give theirs.
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