was arrested and thrown, with my two brothers, loadea with irons, into a ship, stripped, and very ill treated, without being allowed any appeal to justice. I was twenty-eight years old when I came into the service of your Highnesses, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not gray; my body is infirm, and all that was left to me, as well as to my brothers, has been taken away and sold, even to the frock that I wore. The honest devotedness that I have ever shown to the service of your Majesties, and the so unmerited outrage with which it has been repaid, will not allow my soul to keep silence, however much I may wish it. I implore your Highnesses to forgive my complaints. Hitherto I have wept over others; may Heaven now have mercy upon me, and may the earth weep for me! Solitary in my trouble, sick, in daily expectation of death, surrounded by millions of hostile savages full of cruelty, and thus separated from the blessed sacraments of our Holy Church, how will my soul be forgotten if it be separated from the body in this foreign land? Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth and justice! I humbly beseech your Highnesses, that, if it please God to rescue me from this place, you will graciously sanction my pilgrimage to Rome and other holy places."

A majority of the noblest geniuses who have conferred the greatest benefits on mankind, have been spit upon or gnashed at and banned by the dominant class of their contemporaries. Prophets, discoverers, inventors, martyrs, illustrious company gathered from many times and countries, and associated in one fellowship of sublime genius, heroic devotion, and tragic fate, -history has nothing left of equal pathos to reveal when it has shown us these men, dreaded, despised, persecuted, outcast, dying, appealing to after generations to do them the justice so cruelly denied in their own. Nor has posterity proved recreant to the holy trust. They are revered and celebrated now with an enthusiasm in strange contrast with the obloquy they suffered when alive. And to enter into sympathy with them is an inexpressible comfort to those who in later times are called to a kindred experience. As

Heine says, “An equally great man sees his predecessors far more significantly than others can. From a single spark of the traces of their earthly glory he recognizes their most secret act; from a single word left behind he penetrates every fold of their hearts; and thus the great men of all times live in a mystical brotherhood. Across long centuries they bow to each other, and gaze on each other with significant glances, and their eyes meet over the graves of buried races whom they have thrust aside between, and they understand and love each other." It is delightful to notice the geniality with which, in his Cosmos, the grand old Humboldt recognizes his great predecessors in the enterprise of surveying the universe as a whole, Strabo, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Galen, Aristotle, Lucretius, the elder Pliny, Albertus, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and the rest, - with what joy and piety he signalizes, from a height like their own, these intellectual peaks looming in clouds and stars athwart the historic table-land of science. The picture, in the New Testament, of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration in converse with Moses and Elias, is a beautiful symbol of the fellowship of the highest kindred spirits in all ages.

The consciousness of thinking and feeling in unison with a multitude, of believing doctrines and observing rites in common with the great majority of our brethren, yields to sympathetic genius an invisible, peace-giving fellowship which causes an indescribable pleasantness to breathe in the air, an infinite friendliness to saturate the landscape. To abandon all the dear familiar beliefs and associations in which one grew up, in allegiance to reason to go exploringly forwards into the obscure future to find some better substitutes, more divinely real and solid, is to be, at least temporarily, like one who advances into a cave in a mountain side; the sight of the green fields, the light of the sun, the sound of the waterfall, the bleat of the goats, and the songs of the herdsmen, all becoming fainter and fainter, until he is lost in darkness and silence. It is impossible that severe pangs should not be involved when conscience sternly orders a sensitive and clinging

soul to renounce prevalent creeds, to cast off current prejudices and usages, to leave popular favor, estranged, behind, and accept newly revealed and persecuted truth with its austere duties. It is to undergo a coronation of hate and agony, and, carrying a crucifix within the bosom, journey on a lonesome way of dolor, publicly shrouded in scorn, secretly transfigured with the smile of God. The loneliest of all mortals are the pioneers of new principles and policies, new faiths and feelings; for they alone have none on earth with whom they can hold brotherhood of soul. Having emerged from the beliefs in which they were educated, thrown away habituated reliances, trusting themselves to original perception as they advance into the unknown, out of which new revelations are breaking on them, their solitude is sometimes as appalling as the experience of one who for the first time rides on a locomotive across a midnight prairie, where, through the level gloom, he seems just plunging off the world into banks of stars.

The bigotry of those whose opinions he rejected has succeeded in attaching an unjust odium to the name of David Hume, who was a man of remarkable goodness of heart and life. He was endowed with a mind of wonderful acuteness and strength, exceedingly suggestive and stimulative in its working on other minds. His place in the history of philosophy is of epochal importance. Kant ascribes his own original work, of such immense moment, to the impulse directly imparted to him by Hume. One of the results of his unsettling inquiries, his idealistic speculations, has been thus impressively depicted by himself. "I am affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who, not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate. Fain would I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth, but I cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart, but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance,

and dreads that storm which beats upon me from every side. I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? When I look abroad, I foresee on every side dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When Í turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; though such is my weakness that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others."

What other experience can be so forsaken and grand as the loneliness of the man who has outgrown the opinions of his age, surveyed all the realms of knowledge and theory thus far achieved, traversed the constellated wastes of spiritual space to the outermost verge of thought, where he confronts the scintillating abyss of mystery, leaves contemporary humanity behind, pitches his tent a hundred leagues ahead of his nearest peer, and lives there, striving to conquer fresh realms for the occupation of posterity? He may be happy even in that forlorn station if he preserves a noble heart of kindness to his kind, and a spirit of self-surrendering trust in God. Such a man needs not recognition by official diplomas. Load him with conventional honors, he would lay the trinkets aside, and retire into himself to commune with his true dignity. He is an emperor, himself his empire. He will not in his self-sufficingness forget the dependence of feebler natures, nor cease to yearn over them in their wants and sorrows. Though isolated from the people by his intellectual transcendency, he will be joined with them by his affections and services; as the snow-capped summit of Dhawalaghiri commerces with the sky in inaccessible solitude, while his gushing streams and his slopes of bloom wed him with the plains. Should the lofty thinker lose his confidence in reason and truth, and give way to a fundamental distrust, - as the tendencies are often so terrible in him to do, becoming a misanthrope and an atheist, — his experience may be compared with the fate of that aeronaut who ascended into the congeal

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ing space until he suffocated from the thinness of the air, and his frozen form, borne in the fragile car, floated about at the will of the atmospheric currents in the cold unsounding vastitude, under the dark sky-vault, the earth shrunk into a great ball below.

The Solitude of Death.

In this attempt to describe the loneliness of human life in its various kinds and relations, one more specification remains, the solitude of death. However filled with the strife and the gayety of bustling throngs the life of the toiling citizen, the queen of fashion, or the popular statesman may be, there is one passage of intense isolation which none can escape.

A lonely hour is on its way to each,

To all; for death knows no companionship.

The approach of a mortal towards the bourn of his earthly destiny is a pilgrimage in which all that composes his external company successively falls away; and as he reaches the brink of the mystery, the last friend shrinks back and leaves him singly to the universal Parent. Ought we not often to be alone with God in anticipation of the hour when He alone will be with us?

Death invests every man with a solemn sphere of solitude, the patriarch amidst his tribe, the victim on the rack, the felon on the gibbet, the gladiator in the arena, the martyr in the flame, the saint on his pallet, smiling at the uplifted cross. Yet there are different densities of loneliness in the experience, between the departures from the sobs and clasped hands of loving families, the cold isolation of suicides, and the horrible desertedness of such fates as those of the forsaken Roman emperors, Tiberius, Caligula, Domitian, Nero and Vitellius, extinguished in the darkness of murder and ashes. Despite the disparities, however, there is a fundamental identity in the last moment. In every case, to die is to break, one after another, the ties that bind us to persons and things,