DISCOURSE.

WHEN Bossuet, who was himself the eagle of eloquence, preached the funeral discourse on Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry the Fourth of France, and wife of Charles the First of England, he had a task far easier than mine to-day. She was indeed the queen of misfortunes; the daughter of a king assassinated in his own capital, and the widow of a king judicially put to death in front of his own palace. Her married life was bounded by the murder of her royal sire, and the execution of her kingly spouse; and she died neglected, far from kith and kin. But for that great man, who in his youth was called, prophetically, a "Father of the Church," the sorrows of her birth and her estate made it easy to gather up the audience in his arms, to moisten the faces of men with tears, to show them the nothingness of mortal glory, and the beauty of eternal life. He led his hearers to his conclusion that day, as the mother lays the sobbing child to her bosom to still its grief.

To-day it is not so with me. Of all my public trials, this is my most trying day. Give me your sympathies, my friends; remember the difficulty of my position,—its delicacy too.

I am to speak of one of the most conspicuous men that New England ever bore, conspicuous, not by accident, but by the nature of his mind, - one of her ablest intellects. I am to speak of an eminent man, of great power, in a great office, one of the landmarks of politics, now laid low. He seemed so great that some men thought he was himself one of the institutions of America. I am to speak while his departure is yet but of yesterday; while the sombre flags still float in our streets. I am no party man; you know I am not. No party is responsible for me, nor I to any one. I am free to commend the good things of all parties, their great and good men; free likewise to censure the evil of all parties. You will not ask me to say what only suits the public ear: there are a hundred to do that to-day. I do not follow opinion because popular. I cannot praise a man because he had great gifts, great station, and great opportunities; I cannot harshly censure a man for trivial mistakes. You will not ask me to flatter because others flatter; to condemn because the ruts of condemnation are so deep and so easy to travel in. It is unjust to be ungenerous, either in praise or blame: only the truth is beautiful in speech. It is not reverential to treat a great man like a spoiled child. Most of you are old enough to know that good and evil are both to be expected of each man. I hope you are all wise enough to discriminate between right and wrong.

Give me your sympathies. This I am sure of, — I shall be as tender in my judgment as a woman's love; I will try to be as fair as the justice of a man. I shall tax your time beyond even my usual wont, for I cannot crush Olympus into a nut. Be not alarmed: if I tax your time the more, I shall tire your patience less. Such a day as this will never come again to you or me. There is no DANIEL WEBSTER left to die, and Nature will not soon give us another such as he. I will take care by my speech that you sit easy on your bench. The theme will take care that you remember what I say.

A great man is the blossom of the world; the individual and prophetic flower, parent of seeds that will be men. This is the greatest work of God; far transcending earth and moon and sun, and all the material magnificence of the universe. It is "a little lower than the angels," and, like the aloe-tree, it blooms but once an age. So we should value, love, and cherish it the more. America has not many great men living now, scarce one: there have been few in her history. Fertile in multitudes, she is stingy in great men,her works mainly achieved by large bodies of but common men. At this day, the world has not many natural masters. There is a dearth of great men. England is no better off than we her child. Sir Robert Peel has for years been dead. Wellington's soul has gone home, and left his body awaiting burial. In France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, few great men appear. The Revolution of 1848, which found every thing else, failed because it found not them. A sad Hungarian weeps over the hidden crown of Maria Theresa; and a sadder countenance drops a tear for the nation of Dante, and the soil of Virgil and Cæsar, Lucretius and Cicero. To me these two seem the greatest men of Europe now. There are great chemists, great geologists, great philologians; but of great men, Christendom has not many. From the highest places of politics great men recede, and in all Europe no kingly intellect now throbs beneath a royal crown. Even Nicholas of Russia is only tall, not great.

man.

But here let us pause a moment, and see what greatness is, looking at the progressive formation of the idea of a great In general, greatness is eminence of ability; so there are as many different forms thereof as there are qualities wherein a man may be eminent. These various forms of greatness should be distinctly marked, that, when we say a man is great, we may know exactly what we mean.

In the rudest ages, when the body is man's only tool for work or war, eminent strength of body is the thing most

coveted. Then, and so long as human affairs are controlled by brute force, the giant is thought to be the great man,is had in honor for his eminent brute strength.

When men have a little outgrown that period of force, cunning is the quality most prized. The nimble brain outwits the heavy arm, and brings the circumvented giant to the ground. He who can overreach his antagonist, plotting more subtly, winning with more deceitful skill; who can turn and double on his unseen track, "can smile and smile, and be a villain," he is the great man.

Brute force is merely animal; cunning is the animalism of the intellect, the mind's least intellectual element. men go on in their development, finding qualities more valuable than the strength of the lion or the subtlety of the fox, they come to value higher intellectual faculties, — great understanding, great imagination, great reason. Power to think is then the faculty men value most; ability to devise means for attaining ends desired; the power to originate ideas, to express them in speech, to organize them into institutions; to organize things into a machine, men into an army, or a state, or a gang of operatives; to administer these various organizations. He who is eminent in this ability is thought the great man.

But there are qualities nobler than the mere intellect, the moral, the affectional, the religious faculties, the power of justice, of love, of holiness, of trust in God, and of obedience to his law, the Eternal Right. These are the highest qualities of man: whoso is most eminent therein is the greatest of great men. He is as much above the merely intellectual great men, as they above the men of mere cunning or of force.

Thus, then, we have four different kinds of greatness. Let me name them bodily greatness, crafty greatness, intellectual greatness, religious greatness. Men in different degrees of development will value the different kinds of greatness.

Belial cannot yet honor Christ. How can the little girl appreciate Aristotle and Kant? The child thinks as a child. You must have manhood in you to honor it in others, even to see it.

Yet how we love to honor men eminent in such modes of greatness as we can understand! Indeed, we must do so. Soon as we really see a real great man, his magnetism draws us, will we or no. Do any of you remember when, for the first time in adult years, you stood beside the ocean, or some great mountain of New Hampshire, or Virginia, or Pennsylvania, or the mighty mounts that rise in Switzerland? Do you remember what emotions came upon you at the awful presence? But if you were confronted by a man of vast genius, of colossal history and achievements, immense personal power of wisdom, justice, philanthropy, religion, of mighty power of will and mighty act; if you feel him as you feel the mountain and the sea, what grander emotions spring up! It is like making the acquaintance of one of the elementary forces of the earth,-like associating with gravitation itself! The stiffest neck bends over: down go the democratic knees; human nature is loyal then! A New England shipmaster, wrecked on an island in the Indian Sea, was seized by his conquerors, and made their chief. Their captive became their king. After years of rule, he managed to escape. When he once more] visited his former realm, he found that the savages had carried him to heaven, and worshipped him as a god greater than their fancied deities: he had revolutionized divinity, and was himself enthroned as a god. Why so? In intellectual qualities, in religious qualities, he was superior to their idea of God, and so they worshipped him. So loyal is human nature to its great men.

Talk of Democracy!- we are all looking for a master; a man manlier than we. We are always looking for a great man to solve the difficulty too hard for us, to break the