The following paragraph is the conclusion of James G. Blaine’s eulogy
of President Garfield, and forms one of the finest passages of English
prose:
Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale
sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to
die, as God should will. Within sight of its heaving billows,
within sound of its manifold voices, with wan, fevered face
tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully
upon the ocean’s changing wonders, on its far sails whitening
in the morning light, on its restless waves rolling shoreward
to break and die beneath the noonday sun, on the red clouds of
evening arching low to the horizon, on the serene and shining
pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a
mystic meaning, which only the rapt and parting soul may know.
Let us believe that, in the silence of the receding world,
he heard the great wave breaking on a farther shore, and felt
already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.
(2995)
=Solar Energy=--See ENERGY; UTILIZATION.