In another age he might have sat among the
elders of the land in purple-bordered toga; in another country
mothers might have sung him to the cradles.
He did his work,--he did it nobly and well; and yet I
sorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human sym-
pathy. His name to-day, in this broad land, means little, and
comes to fifty million ears laden with no incense of memory
or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that
men are poor,--all men know something of poverty; not that
men are wicked,--who is good? not that men are ignorant,--
what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and
said, "The gate is rusty on the hinges." That night at star-
rise a wind came moaning out of the west to blow the gate
ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a flame across the
Seas, and in its seat sat Death.
I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dim world
beyond, as he came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne
a King,--a dark and pierced Jew, who knows the writhings
of the earthly damned, saying, as he laid those heart-wrung
talents down, "Well done!" while round about the morning
stars sat singing.
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