DISCOURSE 01 DR. J. C. WELLINU. 19 



his plans. He rehearsed to them his scientific experiments. He 

 reported to them the record of each day's adventures. He read 

 with them his favorite authors.* He entered with a gleeful spirit 

 into all their joys; with a sympathetic heart into all their sorrows. 

 And while thus faithful to the charities of home he was intensely 

 loyal to his friends, and found in their society the very cordial of 

 life. Gracious to all, he grappled some of them to his heart with 

 hooks of steel. The friendship, fed by a kindred love of elegant 

 letters, which still lends its mellow lustre to the names of Cicero 

 and Atticus, was not more beautiful than the friendship, fed by 

 kindred talents, kindred virtues, and kindred pursuits, which so 

 long united the late Dr. Bache and Professor Henry in the bonds 

 of a sacred brotherhood. And this was but one of the many similar 

 intimacies which came to embellish his long and useful career. 



His sense of honor was delicate in the extreme. It was not only 

 that "chastity of honor which feels a stain like a wound," but at 

 the very suggestion of a stain it recoiled as instantly as the index 

 finger of Mr. Edison's tasimeter at the "suspicion" of heat. I 

 met him in 1847, when, soon after his election as Secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, he had just been chosen to succeed Dr. 

 Hare as Professor of Chemistry in the Medical Department of the 

 University of Pennsylvania, at a salary double that which he was 

 to receive in Washington, and with half the year open to free 

 scientific investigation, because free from professional duties. It 

 was, he said, the post which, of all others, he could have desiderated 

 at that epoch in his scientific life, but his honor, he added, forbade 

 him to entertain, for a moment, the proposition of accepting it after 



* The following extract from a diary, kept by one of his daughters, is descriptive 

 of his habits under this head : " Had father with us all the evening. I modelled his 

 profile in clay while he read Thomson's Seasons to us. In the earlier part of the 

 evening he seemed restless and depressed, but the influence of the poet drove away 

 the cloud, and then an expression of almost childlike sweetness rested on his lips, 

 singularly in contrast yet beautifully in harmony, with the intellect of the brow 

 above." 



Or take this extract from the same diary: "We were all up until a late hour, 

 reading poetry with lather and mother, father being the reader. He attempted Cow- 

 per's Grave, by Mrs. Browning, but was too tender-hearted to finish the reading of 

 it. We then laughed over the Address to the Mummy, soared to heaven with Shel- 

 U-y's Skylark, roamed the forest with Bryant, culled flowers from other poetical 

 fields, and ended with Ta7n O'Shanter. I took for my task to recite a part of the 

 latter from memory, while father corrected, as if he were ' playing schoolmaster.' " 



