CONCLUSION 145 



He loved to read that stirring Lyric of Brownell, "The 

 Bay Fight," when "Farragut's Flag was flying," but he 

 could never get beyond the passage beginning: "Up went 

 the white." What follows is a vivid description of the sud- 

 den change that comes over brave men, all savage with 

 fight, when they come to look at the cost of victory, the 

 dead, the dying, the wounded, and think of the heartrend- 

 ing sorrows that come to men, women and little children 

 in some far-away and once happy home. 



Although not "a book man," or a collector of books, in 

 the ordinary sense, he was a lover of books and familiar 

 with the great masters of our speech from Chaucer to 

 Tennyson. Literature was to him not so much an inter- 

 preter of nature and man, as a revelation of the widening 

 possibilities of human life, of finer modes of feeling, and of 

 nobler thoughts. Of the older writers, Edmund Spenser 

 seems to have been a favorite, and as he entered the long 

 picture-gallery of the "Faerie Queene," he felt as Milton 

 did: "Our sage and serious Spenser is a better teacher than 

 Scotus or Aquinas." The old dramatists, who are known 

 to the great majority of modern readers only by name, were 

 a mine in which he worked, and he made extensive studies 

 of some of them. Massinger seems to have been his favorite. 

 He possessed in a remarkable degree "retentiveness," 

 which George Eliot calls "a rare and massive power, like 

 fortitude." It is indeed a happy gift to be able to enjoy and 

 profit by a good book and keep both the enjoyment and 

 the profit as a perpetual inheritance. He had a remarkably 

 retentive memory which served him well both in work and 

 play. The scenes he had witnessed, the persons he had met, 

 the heroic deeds and noble thoughts of which he had heard 



