s needed to realize the
fulness of its possibilities, they so identify themselves with it by
their deeds that they thenceforth personify to the world the movement
which brought them forth, and of which their own achievements are at
once the climax and the most dazzling illustration. Fewer still, but
happiest of all, viewed from the standpoint of fame, are those whose
departure is as well timed as their appearance, who do not survive the
instant of perfected success, to linger on subjected to the searching
tests of common life, but pass from our ken in a blaze of glory which
thenceforth forever encircles their names. In that evening light break
away and vanish the ominous clouds wherewith human frailties or tyrant
passions had threatened to darken their renown; and their sun goes
down with a lustre which the lapse of time is powerless to dim. Such
was the privilege of the stainless Wolfe; such, beyond all others,
that of Nelson. Rarely has a man been more favored in the hour of his
appearing; never one so fortunate in the moment of his death.

Yet, however accidental, or providential, this rarely allotted
portion, this crowning incident of an heroic career, it is after all
but an incident. It the man has not contrived; but to it he has
contributed much, without which his passing hour would have faded to
memory, undistinguished among those of the myriads, great and small,
who have died as nobly and are forever forgotten. A sun has set; but
before its setting it has run a course, be it long or short, and has
gathered a radiance which fixes upon its parting beams the rapt
attention of beholders. The man's self and the man's works, what he
was and what he did, the nature which brought forth such fruits, the
thoughts which issued in such acts, hopes, fears, desires, quick
intuitions, painful struggles, lofty ambitions, happy opportunities,
have blended to form that luminous whole, known and seen of all, but
not to be understood except by a patient effort to resolve the great
result into its several rays, to separate the strands whose twisting
has made so strong a cord.

Concerning the man's external acts, it will often happen that their
true value and significance can best be learned, not from his own
personal recital, but from an analytic study of the deeds themselves.
Yet into them, too, often enters, not only the subtile working of
their author's natural qualities, but also a certain previous history
of well-defined opin