ch more to have it
live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that
one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of
logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes
straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the
sinner as well as the saint. The works of other men live, but their
personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself
in his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity
with all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his
song. We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it
with its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects
that flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept
unchanging in the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho,
the tenderness of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the
lofty contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if
they were living, in a few tears of amber verse. It seems, when one
reads,

"Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,"

or,

"The glories of our birth and state,"

as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such an
immortality at least as a perishable language can give. A single lyric
is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect
one of those jewels fit to sparkle "on the stretched forefinger of
all time." A coin, a ring, a string of verses. These last, and hardly
anything else does. Every century is an overloaded ship that must sink
at last with most of its cargo. The small portion of its crew that get
on board the new vessel which takes them off don't pretend to save a
great many of the bulky articles. But they must not and will not leave
behind the hereditary jewels of the race; and if you have found and cut
a diamond, were it only a spark with a single polished facet, it will
stand a better chance of being saved from the wreck than anything, no
matter what, that wants much room for stowage.

The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their
builders' names. But the ring of Thothmes III., who reigned some
fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the
Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord
Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more than
three thousand years ago. The gold coins with the head of Al