650 SAMUEL ELIOT. 



of him may remain. This makes small difference; such work as his has 

 the supreme grace of permeating that with which it deals. More and 

 more, as one considers it, one feels that, for all the distinction of pres- 

 ence which in life made him always seem a personage, he labored in full 

 humility of spirit, as a servant of the Master to whom his loyalty never 

 wavered. 



For, beyond doubt, the deepest trait of his true character was the sim- 

 ple fervor of his religious faith, a faith which sustained him in every trial, 

 which inspired him in every duty. A single example of this will recur 

 to whoever saw him in wliat must have been among the most trying 

 moments of his later years. At a meeting in memory of an old friend, 

 for whom he had personally cared, and whose character and life he had 

 deeply respected, he was called on, amid the general eulogy, to pay his 

 own tribute to the departed. He did not speak long ; and he spoke 

 kindly, gently, appreciatively. But you felt in his speech a touch of 

 hesitation, a touch even of chill, which you did not quite understand. 

 Then finallv, — very simply, but very firmly, and with a rigidity of face 

 wliich showed a rigid sense of duty impelling him, — he told us that be 

 could not truthfully refrain from expressing his deep sorrow tliat our 

 friend who was gone had not crowned a character which was almost 

 complete by the final grace of Christianity. Written down, this act of his 

 may seem bigoted, tactless, narrow. What made it so admirably mem- 

 orable to those who witnessed it was the noble fearlessness of its con- 

 scientious sincerity, — a trait which freed it from all the invidiousness it 

 might have had if the words had fallen from any other lips than his. 



Such a memory of him as this might seem to imply tliat a dominant 

 trait of his personal presence was austerity. Nothing could be further 

 from the truth. It is doubtful, indeed, whether any of those who had 

 the privilege to know him in the hearty intercourse of his private life, 

 will remember anything of him sooner or more constantly than his 

 simple, wholesome sense of liumor. It was not that he uttered clever 

 things, or told stories, or gave himself over to any conventional whim- 

 sicalities of thought or phrase. But in the unfailing oddities of daily life, 

 in a thousand turns of fact or of speech which to most of us would seem 

 commonplace, he found, with something like boyish zest, inexhaustible 

 stimulus to such hearty, spontaneous la'ughter as speaks at once un- 

 trammelled power of enjoyment, unfailing sympathy with the little 

 failings and vexations and absurdities of human beings, and all the while 

 a singular purity of spirit. 



Purity of spirit is what one finally feels to have been his rarest gift. 



