away, so that a country neighbor
said it reached farther than any hand he ever met with. The odd thing
was that friendship in Davidson seemed so little to interfere with
criticism. Persons with whom intercourse was one long contradiction on
his part, and who appeared to annoy him to extermination, he none the
less loved tenderly, and enjoyed living with them. "He's the most
utterly selfish, illiberal and narrow-hearted human being I ever knew,"
I heard him once say of someone, "and yet he's the dearest, nicest
fellow living." His enthusiastic belief in any young person who gave a
promise of genius was touching. Naturally a man who is willing, as he
was, to be a prophet, always finds some women who are willing to be
disciples. I never heard of any sentimental weakness in Davidson in
this relation, save possibly in one case. They harmed themselves at
the fire of his soul, and he told them truths without accommodation.
"You 're farther off from God than any woman I ever heard of." "Nay,
if you believe in a protective tariff, you 're in hell already, though
you may not know it." "You had a fine hysterical time last night,
didn't you, when Miss B was brought up from the ravine with her
dislocated shoulder." To Miss B he said: "I don't pity you. It served
you right for being so ignorant as to go there at that hour." Seldom,
strange to say, did the recipients of these deliverances seem to resent
them.

What with Davidson's warmth of heart and sociability, I used to wonder
at his never marrying. Two years before his death he told me the
reason--an unhappy youthful love-affair in Scotland. Twice in later
life, he said, temptation had come to him, and he had had to make his
decision. When he had come to the point, he had felt each time that
the tie with the dead girl was prohibitive. "When two persons have
known each other as we did," he said, "neither can ever fully belong to
a stranger. So it would n't do." "It would n't do, it would n't do!"
he repeated, as we lay on the hillside, in a tone so musically tender
that it chimes in my ear now as I write down his confession. It can
surely be no breach of confidence to publish it--it is too creditable
to the profundity of Davidson's affections. As I knew him, he was one
of the purest of human beings.

If one asks, now, what the _value_ of Thomas Davidson was, what was the
general significance of his life, apart from his particular books and
articles, I have to