before her time at thirty-nine years
of age, when the path of fame was just beginning to be bright before
her, and the world was just beginning to know how much it wanted her.
Charlotte Bronte, the gifted and the feeble, the lynx-eyed and the
blind, so full of glorious strength and pitiable weakness! Charlotte
Bronte, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a
giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronte cannot tell why she is
so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,--why earth, our
beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that
the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why
Charlotte Bronte was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow cheek
and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor last of all. The
pale-eyed school-girl, who never played along with the other children,
never ran and laughed and shouted with the rest, little knew what days
and hours and years of dulness, of pain and agony, she was laying up for
the future, what a premature grave she was digging for herself. Peace be
with her, her toil is over; it is now three years since Heaven received
in Charlotte Bronte one angel more.

Intellect, then, needs _body_. Come, then, and see me build a Man! A
calm, silent devotion, a conscience pure and reverent, a heart manful
and true, an intellect clear and keen, a frame of iron,--with these will
we dower our hero, and call him Washington!

From me Washington needs no eulogy. Free America is at once his eulogy
and his monument! It is useless to say more. Every one here feels in his
heart a higher praise than can be uttered by the tongue. But let me ask
you, What would Washington's qualities of mind and heart have availed
his country, unless the manly strength, the frame of iron had been
added? A good man he might have been, a patriot he surely would have
been; but the Father of his Country, never! The soul that trusted in
God, the conscience that felt the omnipotence of justice and right, the
heart that beat for his country's weal alone, the mind that thought out
her freedom, was upborne by the body that knew no fatigue, by the nerves
that knew not how to tremble.

Washington had to endure physical fatigue enough to have killed three
ordinary men. And how well did his youth prepare him for a
life of protracted toil. Hear his biographer Irving. "He was a
self-disciplinarian in physical as well as mental matters, and practised