Some wonderous pageant; and you scarce would start, If, from a beech's heart, A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say, "Behold me! I am May!" (From a Memorial Address on "The Life and Character of James Abram Garfield.") On the morning of Saturday, July second, the President was a contented and happy man. He felt that after four months of trial his administration was strong in popular favor; that grave difficulties confronting him at his inauguration had been safely passed; that trouble lay behind him and not before him; that he was going to his alma mater to renew the most cherished associations of his young manhood, and to exchange greetings with those whose deepening interest had followed every step of his upward progress from the day he entered upon his college course until he had attained the loftiest elevation in the gift of his countrymen. Surely, if happiness can ever come from the honors or triumphs of this world, on that quiet July morning James A. Garfield may well have been a happy man. No foreboding of evil haunted him; no slightest premonition of danger clouded his sky. His terrible fate was upon him in an instant. One moment he stood erect, strong, confident in the years stretching peacefully before him. The next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence, and the grave. Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's interests, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death-and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony, that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight, and calm courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell—what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends, a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy sons just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a father's love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demand. Before him, desolation and great darkness! And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, enshrined in the prayers of a world, all the love and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine press alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divine decree. As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked wistfully out upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning. ad min' is tra' tion, direction; government of public affairs. al' ma ma' ter, term employed by students to designate the college where they were educated. de moʼni ac, like a demon; wicked; cruel. fren' zy, madness; delirium. in au' gu ra' tion, act of inaugurating in' spi ra' tion, elevating influence. INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. DAVID SWING. (From "Motives of Life" — A. C. McClurg & Co., Publishers.) To possess a cultivated mind, and to have some general knowledge of the world around us, both in its material and living kingdoms, is such a hunger of the soul that it may be called an instinct. There are tribes of savages so low in mental action that they have no desire to add to their stock of information. Their brains have never been sufficiently aroused to enable them to think. They have not the mental power that can frame a regret. Sir John Lubbock found tribes so stupid, and so sleepy, that any remark he might make to them about Europe or America, or about steamships, or telegraph, or railway, seemed to annoy them by disturbing their intellectual repose. The distance between the uncivilized races and the civilized ones is almost like that between a walrus-oil lamp and the sun. The moment you pass into a civilized land, ancient or modern, the mind is seen to be awake, and to be hungry for ideas. "Give me knowledge or I shall die," has been the plaintive prayer of almost countless millions. No doubt the human race has sought gold too ardently, and does so still, but we must not suffer that passion to conceal from us the fact that in all the many civilized centuries, this same race has with equal zeal asked the universe to tell man its secrets. We have been not only a money-seeking race, but we have been rather good children, and have studied hard the lessons on the page of science and art and history. If, when you look out and see millions rushing to and fro for money, you feel that man is an idolater, you can partly dispel the painful thought if you attempt to count the multitude who in that very hour are poring over books, or who in meditation are seeking the laws of the God of nature. Millions upon millions of the young and the old are in these days seeking at school or at home, in life's morn or noon or evening, the facts of history and science and art and religion. In order to be ourselves properly impelled or enticed along life's path, we must make no wrong estimate of the influences which are impelling mankind, for if we come to think that all are worshiping gold, we, too, despairing of all else, will soon degrade ourselves by bowing at the same altar. It is necessary for us always to be just. We must be fully conscious of the fact that there are many feet hurrying along through the places of barter, intent on more gold, but so must we be conscious that there is a vast army of young and old who are asking the great world to come and tell them its great experience, and to lead them through its literature and arts, and down the grand avenues of history. When the time of our late eclipse drew near, what a procession of arts and of instruments moved far out to where the shadow would fall! And others had marked just where the darkness would come and the second of its coming. As man can measure the width of a river, and find through what spaces |