ed his boyhood,
to the palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which
struck him from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his
later years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger,
and after a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his
most intimate daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons.
Did not my own consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer
itself into this brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record?
I, too, seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were
my own, the charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere.
I shared his heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social
triumphs, I was honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about
him, I was wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with
him in his sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his
memory, I felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so
long as my self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable
elements.

The years passed away, and the influences derived from the
companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own
current of being. Then there came to me a new experience in my relations
with an eminent member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually
for a long period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a
prelude to a work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances.
He was the subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost
necessarily fatal disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon
itself if it were not supplied with food from without, he determined
to write a treatise on a subject which had greatly interested him, and
which would oblige him to bestow much of his time and thought upon it,
if indeed he could hold out to finish the work. During the period
while he was engaged in writing it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect
health, died suddenly of pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress,
the prospect of death at a near, if uncertain, time always before him,
it was hard to conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to
endure. When, in the hour of his greatest need, his faithful companion,
the wife of many years of happy union, whose hand had smoothed his
pillow, whose voice had consoled and cheered him, was torn from him
after a few days of illness, I felt that my friend's tria