few months before he had given, out of his private purse, forty thousand
dollars to a Baptist college. He was a man who talked and urged a hearty
union of feeling between the North and the South. He always hoped to
abolish sectional feeling by one grand movement for the financial,
educational, and moral welfare of the Nation. It was my urgent wish that
President Garfield should invite Senator Brown to a place in his
Cabinet, although the Senator would probably have refused the honour,
for there was no better place to serve the American people than in the
American Senate.

During the first week in February, 1881, the world hovered over the
death-bed of Thomas Carlyle. He was the great enemy of all sorts of
cant, philosophical or religious. He was for half a century the great
literary iconoclast. Daily bulletins of the sick-bed were published
world-wide. There was no easy chair in his study, no soft divans. It was
just a place to work, and to stay at work. I once saw a private letter,
written by Carlyle to Thomas Chalmers. The first part of it was devoted
to a eulogy of Chalmers, the latter part descriptive of his own
religious doubts. He never wrote anything finer. It was beautiful,
grand, glorious, melancholy.

Thomas Carlyle started with the idea that the intellect was all, the
body nothing but an adjunct, an appendage. He would spur the intellect
to costly energies, and send the body supperless to bed. After years of
doubts and fears I learned that towards the end he returned to the
simplicities of the Gospel.

While this great thinker of the whole of life was sinking into his last
earthly sleep, the men in the parliament of his nation were squabbling
about future ambitions. Thirty-five Irish members were forcibly ejected.