Chapter VI: Part 6

I would fain say a few words on my father's last illness, or rather on what led to it, and I wish you and others in the ministry would take to heart, as matter of immediate religious duty, much of what I am going to say. My father was a seven months' child, and lay, I believe, for a fortnight in black wool, undressed, doing little but breathe and sleep, not capable of being fed. He continued all his life slight in make, and not robust in health, though lively, and capable of great single efforts. His attendance upon his mother must have saddened his body as well as his mind, and made him willing and able to endure, in spite of his keen and ardent spirit, the sedentary life he in the main led. He was always a very small eater, and nice in his tastes, easily put off from his food by any notion. He therefore started on the full work of life with a finer and more delicate mechanism than a man's ought to be, indeed, in these respects he was much liker a woman; and being very soon "placed," he had little travelling, and little of that tossing about the world, which, in the transition from youth to manhood, hardens the frame as well as supples it. Though delicate, he was almost never ill. I do not remember, till near the close of his life, his ever being in bed a day.

From his nervous system, and his brain predominating steadily over the rest of his body, he was habitually excessive in his professional work. As to quantity, as to quality, as to manner and expression, he flung away his life without stint every Sabbath day, his sermons being laboriously prepared, loudly mandated, and at great expense of body and mind, and then delivered with the utmost vehemence and rapidity. He was quite unconscious of the state he worked himself into, and of the loud, piercing voice in which he often spoke. This I frequently warned him about, as being, I knew, injurious to himself, and often painful to his hearers, and his answer always was, that he was utterly unaware of it; and thus it continued to the close, and very sad it was to me who knew the peril, and saw the coming end, to listen to his noble, rich, persuasive, imperative appeals, and to know that the surplus of power, if retained, would, by God's blessing, retain him, while the effect on his people would, I am sure, not have lost, but in some respects have gained, for much of the discourse which was shouted and sometimes screamed at the full pitch of his keen voice, was of a kind to be better rendered in his deep, quiet, settled tones. This, and the great length of his public services, I knew he himself felt, when too late, had injured him, and many a smile he had at my proposal to have a secret sub-congregational string from him to me in the back seat, to be authoritatively twitched when I knew he had done enough; but this string was never pulled, even in his mind.

He went on in his expensive life, sleeping very little, and always lightly, eating little, never walking except of necessity; little in company, when he would have eaten more, and been, by the power of social relish, made likelier to get the full good out of his food; never diverting his mind by any change but that of one book or subject for another; and every time that any strong affliction came on him, as when made twice a widower, or at his daughter's death, or from such an outrage upon his entire nature and feelings as the Libel, then his delicate machinery was shaken and damaged, not merely by the first shock, but even more by that unrelenting self-command by which he terrified his body into instant submission. Thus it was, and thus it ever must be, if the laws of our bodily constitution, laid down by Him who knows our frame, and from whom our substance is not hid, are set at nought, knowingly or not--if knowingly, the act is so much the more spiritually bad--but if not, it is still punished with the same unerring nicety, the same commensurate meting out of the penalty, and paying "in full tale," as makes the sun to know his time, and splits an erring planet into fragments, driving it into space "wTith hideous ruin and combustion." It is a pitiful and a sad thing to say, but if my father had not been a prodigal in a true but very different meaning, if he had not spent his substance, the portion of goods that fell to him, the capital of life given him by God, in what we must believe to have been needless and therefore preventable excess of effort, we might have had him still with us, shining more and more, and he and they who were with him would have been spared those two years of the valley of the shadow, with its sharp and steady pain, its fallings away of life, its longing for the grave, its sleepless nights and days of weariness and languor, the full expression of which you will find nowhere but in the Psalms and in Job.

I have said that though delicate he was never ill: this was all the worse for him, for, odd as it may seem, many a man's life is lengthened by a sharp illness; and this in several ways. In the first place, he is laid up, out of the reach of all external mischief and exertion, he is like a ship put in dock for repairs; time is gained. A brisk fever clarifies the entire man, if it is beaten and does not beat; it is like cleaning a chimney by setting it on fire; it is perilous but thorough. Then the effort to throw off the disease often quickens and purifies and corroborates the central powers of life; the flame burns more clearly; there is a cleanness, so to speak, about all the wheels of life. Moreover, it is a warning, and makes a man meditate on his bed, and resolve to pull up; and it warns his friends, and likewise, if he is a clergyman, his people, who if their minister is always with them, never once think he can be ever anything but as able as he is.

Such a pause, such a breathing-time my father never got during that part of his life and labours when it would have availed most, and he was an old man in years, before he was a regular patient of any doctor. He was during life subject to sudden headaches, affecting his memory and eyesight, and even his speech; these attacks were, according to the thoughtless phrase of the day, called bilious; that is, he was sick, and was relieved by a blue pill and smart medicine. Their true seat was in the brain; the liver suffered because the brain was ill, and sent no nervous energy to it, or poisoned what it did send. The sharp racking pain in the forehead was the cry of suffering from the anterior lobes, driven by their master to distraction, and turning on him wild with weakness and fear and anger. It was well they did cry out; in some brains (large ones) they would have gone on dumb to sudden and utter ruin, as in apoplexy or palsy; but he did not know, and no one told him their true meaning, and he set about seeking for the outward cause in some article of food, in some recent and quite inadequate cause.

He used, with a sort of odd shame and distress, to ask me why it was that he was subjected to so much suffering from what he called the lower and ignoble regions of his body; and I used to explain to him that he had made them suffer by long years of neglect, and that they were now having their revenge, and in their own way. I have often found, that the more the nervous centres are employed in those offices of thought and feeling the most removed from material objects,--the more the nervous energy of the entire nature is concentrated, engrossed, and used up in such offices,--so much the more, and therefore, are those organs of the body which preside over that organic life, common to ourselves and the lowest worm, defrauded of their necessary nervous food,--and being in the organic and not in the animal department, and having no voice to tell their wants or wrongs, till they wake up and annoy their neighbours who have a voice, that is, who are sensitive to pain, they may have been long ill before they come into the sphere of consciousness. This is the true reason--along with want of purity and change of air, want of exercise, * want of shifting the work of the body--why clergymen, men of letters, and all men of intense mental application, are so liable to be affected with indigestion, constipation, lumbago, and lowness of spirits, _melancholia_--black bile. The brain may not give way for long, because for a time the law of exercise strengthens it; it is fed high, gets the best of everything, of blood and nervous pabulum, and then men have a joy in the victorious work of their brain, and it has a joy of its own, too, which deludes and misleads.

* "The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even
robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of
a two years' almost total want of exercise, which it was
impossible to induce him to take."--Arnold's Report to the
Committee of Council on Education, 1860.

All this happened to my father. He had no formal disease when he died--no structural change; his sleep and his digestion would have been quite sufficient for life even up to the last; the mechanism was entire, but the motive power was gone--it was expended. The silver cord was not so much loosed as relaxed. The golden bowl, the pitcher at the fountain, the wheel at the cistern, were not so much broken as emptied and stayed. The clock had run down before its time, and there was no one but He who first wound it up and set it who could wind it up again; and this He does not do, because it is His law--an express injunction from Him--that, having measured out to His creatures each his measure of life, and left him to the freedom of his own will and the regulation of his reason, He also leaves him to reap as he sows.

Thus it was that my father's illness was not so much a disease as a long death; life ebbing away, consciousness left entire, the certain issue never out of sight. This, to a man of my father's organization--with a keen relish for life, and its highest pleasures and energies, sensitive to impatience, and then over-sensitive of his own impatience; cut to the heart with the long watching and suffering of those he loved, who, after all, could do so little for him; with a nervous system easily sunk, and by its strong play upon his mind darkening and saddening his most central beliefs, shaking his most solid principles, tearing and terrifying his tenderest affections; his mind free and clear, ready for action if it had the power, eager to be in its place in the work of the world and of its Master, to have to spend two long years in this ever-descending road--here was a combination of positive and negative suffering not to be thought of even now, when it is all sunk under that "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory."

He often spoke to me freely about his health, went into it with the fearlessness, exactness, and persistency of his nature; and I never witnessed, or hope to witness, anything more affecting than when, after it had been dawning upon him, he apprehended the true secret of his death. He was deeply humbled, felt that he had done wrong to himself, to his people, to us all, to his faithful and long-suffering Master; and he often said, with a dying energy lighting up his eye, and nerving his voice and gesture, that if it pleased God to let him again speak in his old place, he would not only proclaim again, and, he hoped, more simply and more fully, the everlasting gospel to lost man, but proclaim also the gospel of God to the body, the religious and Christian duty and privilege of living in obedience to the divine laws of health. He was delighted when I read to him, and turned to this purpose that wonderful passage of St. Paul--"For the body is not one member, but many. If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as *it hath pleased him. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the hëad to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, are necessary summing it all up in words with life and death in them--"That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it."

The lesson from all this is, Attend to your bodies, study their structure, functions, and laws. This does not at all mean that you need be an anatomist, or go deep into physiology, or the doctrines of prevention and cure. Not only has each organism a resident doctor, placed there by Him who can thus heal all our diseases; but this doctor, if watched and waited on, informs any man or woman of ordinary sense what things to do, and what things not to do. And I would have you, who, I fear, not unfre-quently sin in the same way, and all our ardent, self-sacrificing young ministers, to reflect whether, after destroying themselves and dying young, they have lost or gained. It is said that God raises up others in our place. God gives you no title to say this. Men--such men as I have in my mind--are valuable to God in proportion to the time they are here. They are the older, the better, the riper and richer, and more enriching. Nothing will make up for this absolute loss of life. For there is something which every man wrho is a good workman is gaining every year just because he is older, and this nothing can replace. Let a man remain on his ground, say a country parish, during half a century or more--let him be every year getting fuller and sweeter in the knowledge of God and man, in utterance and in power--can the power of that man for good over all his time, and especially towards its close, be equalled by that of three or four young, and, it maybe admirable men, who have been succeeding each other's untimely death, during the same space of time? It is against all spiritual, as well as all simple arithmetic, to say so.

You have spoken of my father's prayers. They were of two kinds: the one, formal, careful, systematic, and almost stereotyped, remarkable for fulness and compression of thought: sometimes too manifestly the result of study, and sometimes not purely prayer, but more of the nature of a devotional and even argumentative address; the other, as in the family, short, simple, and varied. He used to tell of his master, Dr. Lawson, reproving him, in his honest but fatherly way, as they were walking home from the Hall. My father had in his prayers the words, "that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil." The old man, leaning on his favourite pupil, said, "John, my man,you need not have said '_that is, the devil_;' you might have been sure that _He_ knew whom you meant." My father, in theory, held that a mixture of formal, fixed prayer, in fact, a liturgy, along with extempore prayer, was the right thing. As you observe, many of his passages in prayer, all who were in the habit of hearing him could anticipate, such as "the enlightening, enlivening, sanctifying, and comforting influences of the good Spirit," and many others. One in especial you must remember; it was only used on very solemn occasions, and curiously unfolds his mental peculiarities; it closed his prayer--"And now, unto Thee, O Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one Jehovah and our God, we would--as is most meet--with the church on earth and the church in heaven, ascribe all honour and glory, dominion and majesty, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." Nothing could be liker him than the interjection, "as is most meet." Sometimes his abrupt, short statements in the Synod were very striking. On one occasion, Mr. James Morison, having stated his views as to prayer very strongly, denying that a sinner _can_ pray, my father, turning to the moderator, said--"Sir, let a man feel himself to be a sinner, and, for anything the universe of creatures can do for him, hopelessly lost,--let him feel this, sir, and let him get a glimpse of the Saviour, and all the eloquence and argument of Mr. Morison will not keep that man from crying out, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' That, sir, is prayer--that is acceptable prayer." There must be, I fear, now and then an apparent discrepancy between you and me, especially as to the degree of mental depression which at times overshadowed my father's nature. _You_ will understand this, and I hope our readers will make allowance for it. Some of it is owing to my constitutional tendency to overstate, and much of it to my having had perhaps more frequent, and even more private, insights into this part of his life. But such inconsistency as that I speak of--the co-existence of a clear, firm faith, a habitual sense of God and of his infinite mercy, the living a life of faith, as if it was in his organic and inner life, more than in his sensational and outward--is quite compatible with that tendency to distrust himself, that bodily darkness and mournfulness, which at times came over him. Any one who knows "what a piece of work is man;" how composite, how varying, how inconsistent human nature is, that each of us is

"Some twenty several men, all in an hour,"

--will not need to be told to expect, or how to harmonize, these differences of mood. You see this in that wonderful man, the apostle Paul, the true typical fulness, the _humanness_, so to speak, of whose nature comes out in such expressions of opposites as these--"By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things."

I cannot, and after your impressive and exact history of his last days, I need not say anything of the close of those long years of ' suffering, active and passive, and that slow ebbing of life; the body, without help or hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind mourningfor its suffering friend, companion, and servant, mourning also, sometimes, that it must be "unclothed," and take its flight all alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever, or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the mind calm and clear,, and the body conscious of its own decay,--dying, as it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were obliged to leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy" had already begun its reign--when he knew us, and that was all, and when he followed us with his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak--the end came; and then, as through life, his will asserted itself supreme in death. With that love of order and decency which was a law of his life, he deliberately composed himself, placing his body at rest, as if setting his house in order before leaving it, and then closed his eyes and mouth, so that his last look--the look his body carried to the grave and faced dissolution in--was that of sweet, dignified self-possession.

I have made this letter much too long, and have said many things in it I never intended saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be able to say. But I must end.

Yours ever affectionately,

J. Brown.

$DR. CHALMERS

"Fervet immensasque ruit--Hor.

"His memory long will live alone

In all our hearts, as mournful light

That broods above the fallen sun,

And dwells in heaven half the night"

Tennyson.

"He was net one man, he was a thousand men."--Sydney Smith.

When, towards the close of some long summer day, we come suddenly, and, as we think, before his time, upon the broad sun, "sinking down in his tranquillity'' into the unclouded west; we cannot keep our eyes from the great spectacle;--and when he is gone, the shadow of him haunts our sight with the spectre of his brightness, which is dark when our eyes are open; luminous when they are shut: we see everywhere,--upon the spotless heaven, upon the distant mountains, upon the fields, and upon the road at our feet,--that dim, strange, changeful image; and if our eyes shut, to recover themselves, we still find in them, like a dying flame, or like a gleam in a dark place, the unmistakable phantom of the mighty orb that has set,--and were we to sit down, as we have often done, and try to record by pencil or by pen, our impression of that supreme hour, still would IT be there. We must have patience with our eye, it will not let the impression go,--that spot on which the radiant disc was impressed, is insensible to all other outward things, for a time: its best relief is, to let the eye wander vaguely over earth and sky, and repose itself on the mild shadowy distance.

So it is when a great and good and beloved man departs, sets--it may be suddenly--and to us who know not the times and the seasons, _too soon_. We gaze eagerly at his last hours, and when he is gone, never to rise again on our sight, we see his image wherever we go, and in whatsoever we are engaged, and if we try to record by words our wonder, our sorrow, and our affection, we cannot see to do it, for the "idea of his life" is for ever coming into our "study of imagination"---into all our thoughts, and we can do little else than let our mind, in a wise passiveness, hush itself to rest.

The sun returns--he knows his rising--

"To-morrow he repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky

but man lieth down, and riseth not again till the heavens are no more. Never again will he whose "Meditations" are now before us, lift up the light of his countenance upon us.

We need not say we look upon him as a great man, as a good man, as a beloved man--_quis desiderio sit pudor tarn cari capitis?_ We cannot now go very curiously to work, to scrutinize the composition of his character,--we cannot take that large, free, genial nature to pieces, and weigh this and measure that, and sum up and pronounce; we are too near as yet to him, and to his loss, he is too dear to us to be so handled. "His death," to use the pathetic words of Hartley Coleridge, "is a recent sorrow; his image still lives in eyes that weep for him." The prevailing feeling is,--He is gone--"_abiit adplures_--he has gone over to the majority, he has joined the famous nations of the dead."

It is no small loss to the world, when one of its master spirits--one of its great lights--a king among the nations --leaves it. A sun is extinguished; a great attractive, regulating power is withdrawn. For though it be a common, it is also a natural thought, to compare a great man to the sun; it is in many respects significant. Like the sun, he rules his day, and he is "for a sign and for seasons, and for days and for years he enlightens, quickens, attracts, and leads after him his host--his generation.

To pursue our image. When the sun sets to us, he rises elsewhere--he goes on rejoicing, like a strong man, running his race. So does a great man: when he leaves us and our concerns--he rises elsewhere; and we may reasonably suppose that one who has in this world played a great part in its greatest histories--who has through a long life been pre-eminent for promoting the good of men and the glory of God--will be looked upon with keen interest, when he joins the company of the immortals. They must have heard of his fame; they may in their ways have seen and helped him already.

Every one must have trembled when reading that passage in Isaiah, in which Hell is described as moved to meet Lucifer at his coming: there is not in human language anything more sublime of conception, more exquisite in expression; it has on it the light of the terrible crystal. But may we not reverse the scene? May we not imagine, when a great and good man--a son of the morning--enters on his rest, that Heaven would move itself to meet him at his coming? that it would stir up its dead, even all the chief ones of the earth, and that the kings of the nations would arise each one from his throne to welcome their brother? that those who saw him would "narrowly consider him," and say, "Is this he who moved nations, enlightened and bettered his fellows, and whom the great Taskmaster welcomes with 'Well done!'"

We cannot help following him, whose loss we now mourn, into that region, and figuring to ourselves his great, childlike spirit, when that unspeakable scene bursts upon his view, when, as by some inward, instant sense, he is conscious of God--of the immediate presence of the All-seeing Unseen; when he beholds "His honourable, true, and only Son," face to face, enshrined in that "glorious form, that light unsufferable, and that far-beaming blaze of Majesty," that brightness of His glory, that express image of His person; when he is admitted into the goodly fellowship of the apostles--the glorious company of the prophets--the noble army of martyrs--the general assembly of just men--and beholds with his loving eyes the myriads of "little ones," outnumbering their elders as the dust of the stars with which the galaxy is filled exceeds in multitude the hosts of heaven.

What a change! death the gate of life--a second birth, in the twinkling- of an eye: this moment, weak, fearful, in the amazement of death; the next, strong, joyful,--at rest,--all things new! To adopt his own words: all his life, up to the last, "knocking at a door not yet opened, with an earnest indefinite longing,--his very soul breaking for the longing,--drinking of water and thirsting again"--and then--suddenly and at once--a door opened into heaven, and the Master heard saying, "Come in, and come up hither!" drinking of the river of life, clear as crystal, of which if a man drink he will never thirst,--being tilled with all the fulness of God!

Dr. Chalmers was a ruler among men: this we know historically; this every man who came within his range felt at once. He was like Agamemnon, a native [Greek], and with all his homeliness of feature and deportment, and his perfect simplicity of expression, there was about him "that divinity that doth hedge a king." You felt a power, in him, and going from him, drawing you to him in spite of yourself. He was in this respect a _solar_ man, he drew after him his own firmament of planets. They, like all free agents, had their centrifugal forces acting ever towards an independent, solitary course, but the centripetal also was there, and they moved with and around their imperial sun,--gracefully or not, willingly or not, as the case might be, but there was no breaking loose: they again, in their own spheres of power, might have their attendant moons, but all were bound to the great massive luminary in the midst.

There is to us a continual mystery in this power of one man over another. We find it acting everywhere, with the simplicity, the ceaselessness, the energy of gravitation; and we may be permitted to speak of this influence as obeying similar conditions; it is proportioned to bulk --for we hold to the notion of a bigness in souls as well as bodies--one soul differing from another in quantity and momentum as well as in quality and force, and its intensity increases by nearness. There is much in what Jonathan Edwards says of one spiritual essence having more of being than another, and in Dr. Chalmers's question, "Is he a man of _wecht?_"

But when we meet a _solar_ man, of ample nature--soul, body, and spirit; when we find him from his earliest years moving among his fellows like a king, moving them whether they will or not--this feeling of mystery is deepened; and though we would not, like some men (who should know better), worship the creature and convert a hero into a god, we do feel more than in other cases the truth, that it is the inspiration of the Almighty which has given to that man understanding, and that all power, all energy, all light, come to him, from the First and the Last--the Living One. God comes to be regarded by us, in this instance, as He ought always to be, "the final centre of repose"--the source of all being, of all life--the _Terminus ad quem_ and the _Terminus a quo_. And assuredly, as in the firmament that simple law of gravitation reigns supreme--making it indeed a _kosmos_--majestic, orderly, comely in its going--ruling, and binding not the less the fiery and nomadic comets, than the gentle, punctual moons--so certainly, and to us moral creatures to a degree transcendently more important, does the whole intelligent universe move around and move towards and in the Father of Lights.

It would be well if the world would, among the many other uses it makes of its great men, make more of this, --that they are manifestors of God--revealers of His will --vessels of His omnipotence--and are among the very chiefest of His ways and works.

As wre have before said, there is a perpetual wonder in this power of one man over his fellows, especially when we meet with it in a great man. You see its operations constantly in history, and through it the Great Ruler has worked out many of His greatest and strangest acts. But however wTe may understand the accessory conditions by which the one man rules the many, and controls and fashions them to his purposes, and transforms them into his likeness--multiplying as it were himself--there remains at the bottom of it all a mystery--a reaction between body and soul that we cannot explain. Generally, however, we find accompanying its manifestation, a capacious understanding--a strong will--an emotional nature, quick, powerful, urgent, undeniable, in perpetual communication with the energetic will and the large resolute intellect--and a strong, hearty, capable body; a countenance and person expressive of this combination--the mind finding its way at once and in full force to the face, to the gesture, to every act of the body. He must have what is called a "presence not that he must be great in size, beautiful, or strong; but he must be expressive and impressive--his outward man must communicate to the beholder at once and without fail, something of indwelling power, and he must be and act as one. You may in your mind analyse him into his several parts; but practically he acts in everything w'ith his whole soul and his whole self; whatsoever his hand finds to do, he does it with his might. Luther, Moses, David, Mahomet, Cromwell--all verified these conditions.

And so did Dr. Chalmers. There was something about his whole air and manner, that disposed you at the very first to make way where he went--he held you before you were aware. That this depended fully as much upon the activity and the quantity--if we may so express ourselves--of his affections, upon that combined action of mind and body which we call temperament, and upon a straightforward, urgent will, as upon what is called the pure intellect, will be generally allowed; but with all this, he could not have been and done, what he was and did, had he not had an understanding, in vigour and in capacity, worthy of its great and ardent companions. It was large and free, mobile, and intense, rather than penetrative, judicial, clear, or fine,--so that in one sense he was more a man to make others act than think; but his own actings had always their origin in some fixed, central, inevitable proposition, as he would call it, and he began his onset with stating plainly, and with lucid calmness, what he held to be a great seminal truth; from this he passed at once, not into exposition, but into illustration and enforcement--into, if we may make a word overwhelming insistance. Something was to be done,' rather than explained.

There was no separating his thoughts and expressions from his person, and looks, and voice. How perfectly we can at this moment recall him! Thundering, flaming, lightening in the pulpit; teaching, indoctrinating, drawing after him his students in his lecture-room; sitting among other public men, the most unconscious, the most king-like of them all, with that broad leonine countenance, that beaming, liberal smile; or on the way out to his home, in his old-fashioned great-coat, with his throat muffled up, his big walking-stick moved outwards in an arc, its point fixed, its head circumferential, a sort of companion and playmate, with which, doubtless, he demolished legions of imaginary foes, errors, and stupidities in men and things, in Church and State. His great look, large chest, large head, his amplitude every way; his broad, simple, childlike, in-turned feet; his short, hurried, impatient step; his erect, royal air; his look of general good-will; his kindling up into a warm but vague benignity wrhen one he did not recognise spoke to him; the addition, for it was not a change, of keen speciality to his hearty recognition; the twinkle of his eyes; the immediately saying something very personal to set all to rights, and then sending you off with some thought, some feeling, some remembrance, making your heart burn within you; his voice indescribable; his eye --that most peculiar feature--not vacant, but asleep--innocent, mild, and large; and his soul, its great inhabitant, not always at his window; but then, when he did awake, how close to you was that burning vehement soul! how it penetrated and overcame you! how mild, and affectionate, and genial its expression at his own fireside!

Of his portraits worth mentioning, there are Watson Gordon's, Ducan's--the Calotypes of Mr. Hill--Kenneth M'Leay's miniatures--the Daguerreotype, and Steell's bust. These are all good, and all give bits of him, some nearly the whole, but not one of them that [Greek], that fiery particle--that inspired look--that "diviner mind" --_poco piu_, or little more. Watson Gordon's is too much of the mere clergyman--is a pleasant likeness, and has the shape of his mouth, and the setting of his feet very good. Duncan's is a work of genius, and is the giant looking up, awakening, but not awakened--it is a very fine picture, Mr. Hill's Calotypes we like better than all the rest; because what in them is true, is absolutely so, and they have some delicate renderings which are all but beyond the power of any human artist; for though man's art is mighty, nature's is mightier. The one of the Doctor sitting with his grandson "Tommy'' is to us the best; we have the true grandeur of his form--his bulk. M'Leay's is admirable--spirited--and has that look of shrewdness and vivacity and immediateness which he had when he was observing and speaking keenly; it is, moreover, a fine, manly bit of art. M'Leay is the Raeburn of miniature painters--he does a great deal with little. The Daguerreotype is, in its own way, excellent; it gives the externality of the man to perfection, but it is Dr. Chalmers at a standstill--his mind and feelings "pulled up" for the second that it was taken. Steell's is a noble bust--has a stern heroic expression and pathetic beauty about it, and from wanting colour and shadow and the eyes, it relies upon a certain simplicity and grandeur;--in this it completely succeeds--the mouth is handled with extraordinary subtlety and sweetness, and the hair hangs over that huge brow like a glorious cloud. We think this head of Dr. Chalmers the artist's greatest bust.

In reference to the assertion we have made as to bulk forming one primary element of a powerful mind, Dr. Chalmers used to say, when a man of activity and public mark was mentioned, "Has he _wecht?_ he has promptitude--has he power? he has power--has he promptitude? and, moreover, has he a discerning spirit?"

These are great practical, universal truths. How few even of our greatest men have had all these three faculties large--fine, sound, and in "perfect diapason." Your men of promptitude, without power or judgment, are common and are useful. But they are apt to run wild, to get needlessly brisk, unpleasantly incessant. A weasel is good or bad as the case may be,--good against vermin--bad to meddle with;--but inspired weasels, weasels on amission, are terrible indeed, mischievous and fell, and swiftness making up for want of momentum by inveteracy; "fierce as wild bulls, untamable as flies." Of such men we have now-a-days too many. Men are too much in the way of supposing that doing is being; that theology and excogiration, and fierce dogmatic assertion of what they consider truth, is godliness; that obedience is merely an occasional great act, and not a series of acts, issuing from a state, like the stream of water from its well.

"Action is transitory--a step--a blow,

The motion of a muscle--this way or that;

'Tis done--and in the after vacancy,

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed.

Suffering" (obedience, or being as opposed to doing)--

"Suffering is permanent,--

And has the nature of infinity."

Dr, Chalmers was a man of genius--he had his own way of thinking, and saying, and doing, and looking everything. Men have vexed themselves in vain to define what genius is; like every ultimate term we may describe it by giving its effects, we can hardly succeed in reaching its essence. Fortunately, though we know not what are its elements, we know it when we meet it; and in him, in every movement of his mind, in every gesture, we had its unmistakable tokens. Two of the ordinary accompaniments of genius--Enthusiasm and Simplicity--he had in rare measure.

He was an enthusiast in its true and good sense; he was "entheat," as if full of God, as the old poets called it. It was this ardour, this superabounding life, this immediateness of thought and action, idea and emotion, setting the whole man agoing at once--that gave a power and a charm to everything he did. To adopt the old division of the Hebrew Doctors, as given by Nathanael Culverwel, in his "Light of Nature:" In man we have--1st, [Greek], the sensitive soul, that which lies nearest the body--the very blossom and flower of life; 2d, [Greek], _animam rationis_, sparklingand glittering with intellectuals, crowned with light; and 3d, [Greek], __impetum animi, motum mentis, the vigour and energy of the soul --its temper--the mover of the other two--the first being, as they said, resident _in hepate_--the second _in cere-bro_--the third _in corde_, where it presides over the issues of life, commands the circulation, and animates and sets the blood a-moving. The first and second are informative, explicative, they "take in and do"--the other "gives out." Now in Dr. Chalmers, the great ingredient was the [Greek] as indicating _vis animo et vitae_,--and in close fellowship with it, and ready for its service, was a large, capacious [Greek], and an energetic, sensuous, rapid [Greek]. Hence his energy, his contagious enthusiasm --this it was which gave the peculiar character to his religion, to his politics, to his personnel; everything he did was done heartily--if he desired heavenly blessings, he "panted" for them--"his soul broke for the longing." To give again the words of the spiritual and subtle Cul-verwel, "Religion (and indeed everything else) was no matter of indifferency to him. It was [Greek], a certain fiery thing, as Aristotle calls love; it required and it got, the very flower and vigour of the spirit--the strength and sinews of the soul--the prime and top of the affections--this is that grace, that panting grace--we know the name of it and that's all--'tis called zeal--a flaming edge of the affection--the ruddy complexion of the soul." Closely connected with this temperament, and with a certain keen sensation of truth, rather than a perception of it, if we may so express ourselves, an intense consciousness of objective reality,--was his simple animating faith. He had faith in God--faith in human nature--faith, if we may say so, in his own instincts--in his ideas of men and things--in himself; and the result was, that unhesitating bearing up and steering right onward--"never bating one jot of heart or hope" so characteristic of him. He had "the substance of things hoped for." He had "the evidence of things not seen."

By his simplicity we do not mean the simplicity of the head--of that he had none; he was eminently shrewd and knowing--more so than many thought; but we refer to that quality of the heart and of the life, expressed by the words, "in simplicity a child." In his own words, from his Daily Readings,--

"When a child is filled with any strong emotion by a surprising event or intelligence, it runs to discharge it on others, impatient of their sympathy; and it marks, I fancy, the simplicity and greater naturalness of this period (Jacob's), that the grown up men and women ran to meet each other, giving way to their first impulses--even as children do."

His emotions were as lively as a child's, and he ran to discharge them. There was in all his ways a certain beautiful unconsciousness of self--an outgoing of the whole nature that we see in children, who are by learned men said to be long ignorant of the Ego--blessed in many respects in their ignorance! This same Ego, as it now exists, being perhaps part of "the fruit of that forbidden tree that mere knowledge of good as well as of evil, which our great mother bought for us at such a price. In this meaning of the word, Dr. Chalmers, considering the size of his understanding--his personal eminence--his dealings with the world--his large sympathies --his scientific knowledge of mind and matter--his relish for the practical details, and for the spirit of public business--was quite singular for his simplicity; and taking this view of it, there was much that was plain and natural in his manner of thinking and acting, which otherwise was obscure and liable to be misunderstood. We cannot better explain what we mean than by giving a passage from Fénélon, which D'Alembert, in his Eloge, quotes as characteristic of that "sweet-souled" prelate. We give the passage entire, as it seems to us to contain a very beautiful, and by no means commonplace truth:--

"Fénélon," says D'Alembert, "a caractérisé lui-même en peu de mots cette simplicité qui le rendoit si cher à tous les cours. 1 La simplicité est la droiture d'une ame qui s'interdit tout retour sur elle et sur ses actions--cette vertu est différente de la sincérité, et la surpasse. On voit beaucoup de gens qui sont sincères sans être simples--Ils ne veulent passer que pour ce qu'ils sont, mais ils craignent sans cesse de passer pour ce qu'ils ne sont pas. L'homme simple n'affecte ni la vertu, ni la vérité même; il n'est jamais occupé de lui, il semble d'avoir perdu ce moi dont on est si jaloux.'"

What delicacy and justness of expression! how true and clear! how little we see now-a-days, among grownup men, of this straightness of the soul--of this losing or never finding "ce moi!" There is more than is perhaps generally thought in this. Man in a state of perfection, would no sooner think of asking himself--am I right? am I appearing to be what inwardly I am? than the eye asks itself--do I see? or a child says to itself--do I love my mother? We have lost this instinctive sense; we have set one portion of ourselves aside to watch the rest; we must keep up appearances and our consistency; we must respect--that is, look back upon--ourselves, and be respected, if possible; we must, by hook or by crook, be respectable.

Dr. Chalmers would have been a sorry Balaam; he was made of different stuff and for other purposes. Your "respectable" men are ever doing their best to keep their status, to maintain their position. He never troubled himself about his status; indeed, we would say status was not the word for him. He had a _sedes_ on which he sat, and from which he spoke; he had an imperium, to and fro which he roamed as he listed: but a status was as little in his way as in that of a Mauritanian lion. Your merely "sincere" men are always thinking of what they said yesterday, and what they may say to-morrow, at the very moment when they should be putting their whole self into to-day. Full of his idea, possessed by it, moved altogether by its power,--believing, he spoke, and without stint or fear, often apparently contradicting his former self--careless about everything, but speaking fully his mind. One other reason for his apparent inconsistencies was, if one may so express it, the spaciousness of his nature. He had room in that capacious head, and affection in that great, hospitable heart, for relishing and taking in the whole range of human thought and feeling. He was several men in one. Multitudinous but not multiplex, in him odd and apparently incongruous notions dwelt peaceably together. The lion lay down with the lamb. Voluntaryism and an endowment--both were best.

He was childlike in his simplicity: though in understanding a man, he was himself in many things a child. Coleridge says, every man should include all his former selves in his present, as a tree has its former years' growths inside its last; so Dr. Chalmers bore along with him his childhood, his youth, his early and full manhood into his mature old age. This gave himself, we doubt not, infinite delight--multiplied his joys, strengthened and sweetened his whole nature, and kept his heart young and tender,--it enabled him to sympathize, to have a fellow-feeling with all, of whatever age. Those who best knew him, who were most habitually with him, know how beautifully this point of his character shone out in daily, hourly life. We well remember long ago loving him before we had seen him--from our having been told, that being out one Saturday at a friend's house near the Pentlands, he collected all the children and small people--the other bairns, as he called them--and with no one else of his own growth, took the lead to the nearest hill-top,--how he made each take the biggest and roundest stone he could find, and carry,--how he panted up the hill himself with one of enormous size,--how he kept up their hearts, and made them shout with glee, with the light of his countenance, and wïth all his pleasant and strange ways and words,--how having got the breathless little men and women to the top of the hill, he, hot and scant of breath, looked round on the world and upon them with his broad benignant smile like the àvypiüfiov Kvfiaruv y&aa/ja--the unnumbered laughter of the sea,--how he set off his own huge "fellow,"--how he watched him setting out on his race, slowly, stupidly, vaguely at first, almost as if he might die before he began to live, then suddenly giving a spring and off like a shot--bounding, tearing, ai>nç êiteirâ irhfovâe kva'lvô^to 2,ânç àvaiâ/;Ç, vires acqtiirens eumîo; how the great and good man was totus in illo; how he spoke to, upbraided him, cheered him, gloried in him, all but prayed for him,--how he joked philosophy to his wondering and ecstatic crew, when he (the stone) disappeared among some brackens--telling them they had the evidence of their senses that he was in, they might even know he wras there by his effects, by the moving brackens, himself unseen; how plain it became that he had gone in, when he actually came out!--how he ran up the opposite side a bit, and then fell back, and lazily expired at the bottom,--how to their astcnishment, but not displeasure--for he "set them off so well," and "was so funny"--he took from each his cherished stone, and set it off himself! showing them how they all ran alike, yet differently; how he went on, "making," as he said, "an induction of particulars," till he came to the Benjamin of the flock, a wee wee man, who had brought up a stone bigger than his own big head; then how he let him, _unicus omnium_, set off his own, and how wonderfully it ran! what miraculous leaps: what escapes from impossible places: and how it ran up the other side farther than any, and by some felicity remained there.

He was an orator in its specific and highest sense. We need not prove this to those who have heard him; we cannot to those who have not. It was a living man sending living, burning words into the minds and heart of men before him, radiating his intense fervour upon them all; but there was no reproducing the entire effect when alone and cool; some one of the elements was gone. We say nothing of this part of his character, because upon this all are agreed. His eloquence rose like a tide, a sea, setting in, bearing down upon you, lifting up all its waves--"deep calling unto deep there was no doing anything but giving yourself up for the time to its will. Do our readers remember Horace's description of Pindar?

"Monte decurrens velut amnis, imbres

Quern super notas aluere ripas,

Fervet immensusque ruit profundo

Pindarus ore:

--"per audaces nova dithyrambos

Verba devolvit, mimerisque fertur

Lege solutis."

This is to our mind singularly characteristic of our per-fervid Scotsman. If we may indulge our conceit, we would paraphrase it thus. His eloquence was like a flooded Scottish river,--it had its origin in some exalted region--in some mountain-truth--some high, immutable reality; it did not rise in a plain, and quietly drain its waters to the sea,--it came sheer down from above. He laid hold of some simple truth--the love of God, the Divine method of justification, the unchangeableness of human nature, the supremacy of conscience, the honourableness of all men; and having got this vividly before his mind, on he moved--the river rose at once, drawing everything into its course--

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,--

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,'

things outward and things inward, interests immediate and remote--God and eternity--men, miserable and immortal--this world and the next--clear light and unsearchable mystery--the word and the works of God--everything contributed to swell the volume and add to the onward and widening flood. His river did not flow like Denham's Thames,--

"Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull;

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

There was strength, but there was likewise rage; a fine frenzy--not unoften due mainly to its rapidity and to its being raised suddenly by his affections; there was some confusion in the stream of his thoughts, some overflowing of the banks, some turbulence, and a certain noble immensity; but its origin was clear and calm, above the region of clouds and storms. If you saw it; if you took up and admitted his proposition, his starting idea, then all else moved on; but once set agoing, once on his way, there was no pausing to inquire, why or how---fervet--ruit--;fertur-, he boils--he rushes--he is borne along; and so are all who hear him.