goals that he was never to reach, will be readily believed. The
pain, however, that I have felt in perusing it, has not been deeper
than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour of his
powers when he wrought on this last labour. In respect of earnest
feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a certain
loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be much
the best of all his works. That he fully meant it to be so, that he
had become strongly attached to it, and that he bestowed great pains
upon it, I trace in almost every page. It contains one picture
which must have cost him extreme distress, and which is a
masterpiece. There are two children in it, touched with a hand as
loving and tender as ever a father caressed his little child with.
There is some young love as pure and innocent and pretty as the
truth. And it is very remarkable that, by reason of the singular
construction of the story, more than one main incident usually
belonging to the end of such a fiction is anticipated in the
beginning, and thus there is an approach to completeness in the
fragment, as to the satisfaction of the reader's mind concerning the
most interesting persons, which could hardly have been better
attained if the writer's breaking-off had been foreseen.

The last line he wrote, and the last proof he corrected, are among
these papers through which I have so sorrowfully made my way. The
condition of the little pages of manuscript where Death stopped his
hand, shows that he had carried them about, and often taken them out
of his pocket here and there, for patient revision and
interlineation. The last words he corrected in print were, "And my
heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss". GOD grant that on that
Christmas Eve when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up
his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some