No one who ever heard John B. Gough can forget his marvelous eloquence,
his wit and his pathos, his scintillating humor, his inimitable
dramatisms. He did not have the polished brilliancy of Everett or the
elegant scholarship of Phillips, and yet when these numbered thousands
of admirers, Gough numbered his tens of thousands. In his
autobiography this man tells us to what sad straits passion had brought
him; how he reflected upon the injury he was doing himself and others,
only to find that his reflections and resolutions snapped like cobwebs
before the onslaught of temptation. One night the young bookbinder
drifted into a little meeting and, buttoning his seedy overcoat to
conceal his rags, in some way he found himself upon his feet and began
to speak. The address that proved a pleasure to others was a
revelation to himself. For the first time Gough tasted the joys of
moving men and mastering them for good. Within a week that love of
public speech and useful service had kindled his mental faculties into
a creative glow. The new and higher love of the heart consumed the
lower love of the body, just as the sun melts manacles of ice from a
man's wrist.

History is full of these transformations wrought by the heart. It was
a new enthusiasm that changed Augustine the epicurean into Augustine
the church father. It was a new enthusiasm that turned Howard the
pleasure-lover into Howard the prison-reformer. It was a glowing heart
that lent power to Mazzini and Garibaldi and gave Italy her new hope
and liberty. Indeed, the history of each life is the history of its
new loves. The enthusiasms are beacon lights that glow in the highway
along which the soul journeys forward. When the hero's ships were
becalmed Virgil tells us that Aeolus struck the hollow mountain with
his staff and straightway, released from their caves, the winds went
forth to stir the waves and smite upon the sails and sweep the becalmed