stroke, and no hand was so mighty to slay, when through long brooding over some intolerable wrong the forces of the spirit had gathered themselves to the storm. It was this stripling who slew Napoleon; his revelation of the real nature and purpose of the man was a prophecy all the years make good. He had turned France into a Golgotha in his lust for power, and women and children were weeping for their dead all over the civilized world. The freedom for which France had fought with such a blind desperation was taking the form and pressure of a new tyranny, and her tyrant was also her idol. Channing saw through the mask; this was to him the devil who had got loose, and there were those in Boston of his mind; the old Puritan spirit could not be cheated into admiration of imperialism, so it must thank God when the idol fell.

You elders know the story; I tell it to the new generation. The people crowded into the old King's Chapel, Dr. Freeman read the lessons, and the sentences seemed to have been written for the time. "Babylon the great has fallen, Hallelujah, Praise ye the Lord," the old man shouted, as his frame lifted and his eyes kindled to the grand conclusion, and burst into tears, and the people sprang to their feet and shouted, "Praise ye the Lord."

Then this small, slender person rises and looks on them, with those great, luminous eyes. Those who heard his sermon said it is not on the paper.

It was as one of the old prophets come again with a burden, the lightning was abroad, smiting through the rains of tender pity for the slain. "Who will not rejoice?" he cries. "Who will not catch and repeat the acclamation, the oppressor is fallen, the world is free," and again the people rose and shouted, "The world is free." He towered high, they say, for that instant. It was the spirit that towered; here was the great angel again standing in the sun; mortality was swallowed up of life.

Of Channing's doctrines, genius and character I have no time to speak; what I wanted to do was to afford some glimpse of the man, and even here I must fail in part, for who shall put a girdle round such a life in forty minutes? But in a word, here was New England, burnt over by the ancient orthodoxy, shorn of its utter sincerity; men were whistling and taking up their papers after listening to the most terrible sermons all over the land. The old deep streams had run dry, and there was no rain. The word must be made sincere again, and men must be won, not through fear but love. Channing poured out those marvelous sermons, his soul went out with them, and there was a new spring.

Slavery came up as the one burning question. Garrison had organized his society; some think Channing lingered a moment too long before he threw the weight of his influence into the scale. He said the slaveholder to him was an abstrac

tion. "But he isn't an abstraction to the slave," Garrison answered, and the shot went home. "We need you, sir," Samuel J. May said, and he saw his duty then, once for all. They were not with him in his church; they refused him the use of it for an anti-slavery meeting. Those farlooking eyes may have foreseen also what we have seen, and Channing's very soul revolted at war; so if there was a pause, and I am not here to worship an idol, but to look at a man, think how the sensitive spirit was held by these ties, and then remember he did give his whole soul and strength in the great debate.

But I should be sorry, in one last word, if you have got the impression that by reason of his feebleness Channing's life for forty years lay mainly in the shadow. I think it was a very pleasant and cheery life, not as the babbling brook, but as the deep, pure river. God gave him his best gift, a good wife, quiet, sweet and restful, and children that stayed and children that just brushed his home with the wings of their angelhood and then were translated, that they should not see death. The summer home at Newport used to overflow with people, so that often they had to sleep somewhere else, and choice souls communed with him from far and wide.

When he went abroad, men like Coleridge and Wordsworth welcomed him, and he rode once with the poet in a country cart, but that was not poetry, even with the lakes and mountains all about

him. The old hilarity died in the south, but he could prance with the children still, and tell them stories out of his own head, and quite forget the moral. A touch of humor also would flash out now and then. "Sent your wife to Newport, have you, because you don't like to go to get the house ready?" hearty old Tuckerman cried, "I would not send my wife to do what I didn't like to do myself." "Nor would your wife go if you did send her," Channing answered, for they were both fond of such swift fence.

A little maid who went to the summer house one day said, "Ah! this is heaven," and little maids don't say that of a dismal place. It is among the traditions that he had that secret of charming a wild horse by touch and whisper, the charm of some of the elder saints, but while he could stop a horse, he could not make one go. The creatures soon got to know him and to take their own time; perhaps among themselves these creatures can pass the news along, and those rats may have whispered, "He is quite harmless; don't mind him."

"I have received many messages from the spirit," he whispered, as the last moment drew on, and then, on a Sunday evening, in the splendor of Autumn, just as the sun set, while the light was flooding the worn face, the spirit was set free from its tabernacle of clay, the last message had come. Channing had gone home, mortality was swallowed up of life.

JAMES MARTINEAU

SINCE the news was flashed over to us,* that James Martineau was dead, I have thought that I would love to say some word about his life, and life's work, so noble to me, and beautiful as it must be to thousands in the old world and the new, who have known him as a man, or through the books he published, which hold the choicest treasure of his life and genius, which in such a man are essentially one and the same. And touching his life, three memories return to me which I will dwell on for a few moments. One is from the life of his eminent sister, and two are my own.

"I remember when I was

that I was in our best

His sister says: under three years of age, chamber one day, where the curtains were drawn, and the blinds let down, so that I was afraid. But the nurse was there also, who set me down in a tiny chair, and laid something on my lap wrapped in soft flannel, and unfolding the wrapping I saw the little red face of a baby." It was the face of her brother James, one day old, the man child, whose life was to be prolonged so far beyond the three score years and ten set down in the ancient psalm as the fair limit of our human life, and so

* Delivered at the Church of the Messiah, New York City, on March 4, 1900, after the death of Martineau.