Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
Do you think that you are going to die, sir? No! there's no hope
of you. You haven't got your lesson yet. You've got to stay after
school. We make a needless ado about capital punishment,--taking
lives, when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't
understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured
on his gravestone once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and
snivelling sense; we've wholly forgotten how to die.
But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it.
If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.
These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught
us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a
revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and
words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.
It has already quickened the feeble pulse of the North, and infused
more and more generous blood into her veins and heart, than any
number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity
could. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has
now something to live for!
One writer says that Brown's peculiar monomania made him to be
"dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.
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