It takes a man to adorn any calling; callings require or bring special
fitness, but manhood crowns the fitness, gives it added scope,
completeness, power and beauty--rejoicing the heart. Good doctors, good
lawyers, good men of affairs, good teachers, are better if they are
beyond reckoning. Wisdom is an intellectual thing, a property of the
mind, but when it is perfect the heart pours through it as the rivers
flowed through paradise. A poem in the Scriptures says that Wisdom
created the world, not as a task, but as a pastime. Speaking of God,
Wisdom says, "I was daily his delight, sporting before him, sporting
in his habitable earth." When one sees a man investing his work with
personal charm, one knows the difference between a photograph and a
painting--a photograph with its hard, incisive fidelities, and a
painting with its living colors, its appeal to feeling, its lovely
beauty, something luxuriously human in it. A teacher has a special
reason for floating his service, if it may be, upon a stream of personal
worth and personal charm, because he deals with children and youth who
respond to what he is, as well as to what he teaches. Daniel says,
"The teachers shall shine as the stars." Our friend here had much of
the oak, much of the granite in his make-up; something also of the
morning scattered upon the hills, something of the son of consolation.
He mellowed with the years. He planted climbing roses beside his
strength, and in the heart of it a tender and delicate consideration;
some of you loved him more and more to the end.
In his early youth he had the happy fortune to serve his country during
the Civil War. The ardors of that crisis glowed in his heart to the end;
the scorching heat gone, the flashing lightning gone, but never the
remaining glory of those years when he ennobled his young manhood by
risking his life for his country. He might have said what Galahad said
of the Holy Grail,
"... Never yet
Hath ...
This Holy thing fail'd from my side nor come
Covered, but moving with me night and day."
He was a faithful member of Stannard Post, and long its commander. He
kept the Friday night of the Post meeting for the Post. Every Sunday
afternoon he passed my house, going to visit a comrade whom illness kept
at home. And he was a religious man--a Christian man. Faith was mixed
with his life. God strengthened him with strength in his soul. He was a
deacon of this church, and while his strength permitted, a teacher in
the Sunday school. He lived by his faith, and he thought about it. It
was one of the great interests of his mind. There is plenty in every
man's experience to limit him, to confine him, to make him small and
petty. This man had at least two enthusiasms which lifted and broadened
his spirit, his patriotism and his religion. The last word he spoke was
the name of his native town in New Hampshire, Bow. A great light came
into his eyes with the name, as if he saw the place in a vision. He
loved his old home and visited it when he could. He went back at last
in imagination and desire to the roothold of his life, and that was
well and fair, for he represented the fineness of that New England
inheritance. One perhaps should not boast, but at least one may say that
it is a goodly inheritance of solidity, fidelity, seriousness, fitness
to live in a community and take part in its affairs.
It is said of Elisha that he took up the mantle of Elijah. The mantle
was a symbol of the spirit; it had become almost a personal thing.
Elijah had wrapped his face in it when he stood in the cave's mouth and
heard the small, still voice of the Lord. He cast it upon Elisha when he
called him from his plow to be a prophet. He smote the waters with it,
when he went to the place where he was to go up in the whirlwind, and
they were divided hither and thither so that they went over on dry
ground. When he went up in the storm, his mantle fell on Elisha. That
mantle lay close to the secrets of the prophet's heart; he wrapped his
face in it when God spoke to him. It was the symbol of his influence; he
called Elisha with it. It was the symbol of his power; he divided the
waters with it. A mantle lies upon the shoulders. It may fit another as
well as its owner. If it could be said that the mantle of this man has
fallen upon the teachers of Burlington, he would need, he could desire,
no other memorial.