planispheres, which such lives describe and fill around them,
_biographs_, assuming that the script is in rays of light. As
differ the stars above in glory, so these differ in the qualities of
their illumination. The brightest of them, to mere human seeming,
are those which shine with the sheer brilliancy of intellect and
genius. These chiefly halo the homes of "the grand old masters" of
poetry, painting, eloquence, and martial glory. These attract to
their disks pilgrims the most numerous and enthusiastic. But, as
the nearest stars are brightest, not largest, so these biographs are
brightest on their earth-side. There are thousands of less sharp
and spangling lustre to the eyes of the multitude, which shine with
tenfold more brilliancy from their eternity-face. These are they
that halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank in the
life of God's love in perpetual streams, and distilled it like a
luminous dew around them; men whose thoughts were not mere
scintillations of genius, but living labors of beneficence, bearing
the proof as well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the
deeds of earth's saints. If the soul, after such long isolation, is
to take again to its embrace so much of the old human corporeity it
wore here below, does it transcend the prerogative of hope in the
great resurrection to believe that these biographs of God's loving
children on earth shall be taken up whole into the same immortality
as the bodies in which they worked His will among men? Is the faith
too fanciful or irreverent that believes, that the corridors and
inner temples of Heaven's Glory will be hung with these biographs of
His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of His love
that radiated from His cross on earth? Is it too presumptuous to
think and say, that such pictures will be as precious in His sight
as any graven by the lives of angels on their outward or homeward
flights of duty and delight? These are they, therefore, that shall