miserating me for having a son riotously and routously engaged.'"

Again and again, we look back and find that the great deed or noble
utterance of some historic figure is merely the echo of an earlier
word or deed of a forbear. We have seen it in the influences that
shaped or in any event steered Garrison, Mazzini, Pestalozzi. Former
President Tucker[R] of Dartmouth College declares that the memorable
speech of the Defender of the Constitution is to be explained not by
his own greatness. His father had made it before him.... This speech
was in his blood. The fact is that the great address of the Defender
of the Constitution was made by his father fifty years earlier when
Colonel Webster moved New Hampshire to enter the Union." The
grandfather of Theodore Parker was the minister of Concord at the time
of the Concord fight and on the Sunday previous he had preached on the
text: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."

That a kinsman or kinswoman may equal, even surpass, a parent in
influence wide and deep upon a child might be variously illustrated.
No more familiar illustration obtains than that of Mary Moody, aunt
of Emerson, of whom his son writes: "She gave high counsel. It was the
privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard
indicated in their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in
education could supply. Lift up your aims, always do what you are
afraid to do, scorn trifles,--such were the maxims she gave her
nephews and which they made their own.... Be generous and great and
you will confer benefits on society, not receive them, through life.
Emerson himself said of his aunt[S]: her power over the mind of her
young friends was almost despotic, describing her influence upon
himself as great as that of Greece or Rome.

It may in truth often be a sister who brings strength and heartening
to a man. Ernest Renan writes to his sister Henriette[T]: "But that
ideal does not exist in our workaday world, I fear. Life is a
struggle, Life is hard and painful, yet let us not lose courage. If
the road be steep, we have within us a great strength; we shall
surmount our stumbling-block. It is enough if we possess our
conscience in rectitude, if our aim be noble, our will firm and
constant. Let happen what may, on that foundation we can build up our
lives." Again he wrote to her: "My lonely, tired heart finds infinite
sweetness in resting upon yours. I sometimes think that I could be
quite happy in