time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating presence and manners,
an ardent American, and in the time of trial an impassioned and eloquent
advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching at last the summit of his
ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James. All this I seemed to
share with him as I tracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester,
and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood, to the
palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which struck him
from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his later
years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger, and after
a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his most intimate
daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own
consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer itself into this
brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record? I, too, seemed
to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were my own, the
charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared his
heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social triumphs, I was
honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him, I was
wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with him in his
sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his memory, I
felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so long as my
self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.

The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships
I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being.
Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent
member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long
period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a
work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the
subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal
disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were