he worked at his books with
pleasure and animation--revising, correcting and amending. He never lost
the calm serenity of life. He sank gradually into sleep and passed
painlessly away. And thus was gracefully rounded out the greatest life
of its age--The Age of Herbert Spencer.

He left no request as to where he should be buried, but the thinking
people who recognized his genius considered Westminster Abbey the
fitting place--an honor to England's Valhalla. The Church of England
denied him a place there before it was asked, and the hallowed precincts
which shelter the remains of Queen Anne's cook and John Broughton the
pugilist are not for Herbert Spencer. His dust does not rest in
consecrated ground.

Herbert Spencer had no titles nor degrees--he belonged to no sect,
party, nor society. Practically, he had no recognition in England until
after he was sixty years of age. America first saw his star in the east,
and long before the first edition of "Social Statics" had been sold, we
waived the matter of copyright and were issuing the book here. On
receiving a volume of the pirated edition, the author paraphrased
Byron's famous mot, and grimly said, "Now, Barabbas was an American."

However, Spencer was really pleased to think that America should steal
his book; we wanted it--the English didn't. It took him twelve years to
dispose of the seven hundred fifty volumes, and most of these were given
away as inscribed copies. They lasted about as long as Walt Whitman's
first edition of "Leaves of Grass," although Whitman had the assistance
of the Attorney-General of Massachusetts in advertising his remarkable
volume.

Henry Thoreau's first book fared better, for when the house burned where
the remnant of four hundred copies lingered long, he wrote to a friend,
"Thank God, the edition is exhausted."

England recognized the worth of Thoreau and Whitman long before America
did; and so, perhaps, it was meet that we should do as much for Spencer,
Ruskin and Carlyle.

One of the most valuable of the many great thoughts evolved by Spencer
was on the "Art of Mentation," or brain-building. You can not afford to
fix your mind on devils or hell, or on any other form of fear, hate and
revenge. Of course, hell is for others, and the devils we believe in are
not for ourselves. But the thoughts of these things are registered in
the brain, and the hell we create for others, we ourselves eventually
fall into; and the devils we conjure fo