re the leper lived in hiding: "Strit must not pass!"

Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
took a man's share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all and all the rest of our
sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
of our literature.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
Amuse him, even when they wronged him
Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month
Christianity had done not