214 BULLETIN or THE 



should have "talked " so little about it. But the surprise is quite 

 unfounded. Prof. Henry was little in the habit of talking about 

 himself at any time. Yet to his intimate friends he spoke freely 

 and calmly about his approaching end. Two weeks before he died 

 he said to one such, a gentleman from New York, to whom he 

 was strongly attached : " I may die at any moment. I would 

 like to live long enough to complete some things I have under- 

 taken, but I am content to go. I have had a happy life, and I 

 hope I have been able to do some good." In an hour's conver- 

 sation which I had with him, six days before he died, he referred 

 to the imminence of his death with the same philosophic and 

 Christian composure. And perfectly aware as he Avas, on the 

 day before he died, and on the day of his death, that he had 

 already entered the Dark Valley, he feared no evil as he looked 

 across it, but, poised in a sweet serenity, preserved his soul in 

 patience, at an equal remove from rapture on the one hand, or 

 anything like dismay on the other. For his friends he had even 

 then the same benignant smile, the same warm pressure of the 

 hand, and the same affable converse as of yore. With the 

 astronomer, Newcomb, he pleasantly and intelligently discoursed 

 about the then recent transit of Mercury — not unheedful of the 

 great transit he was making, but giving heed none the less to 

 every opportunity for the inquiry of truth. Towards the attend- 

 ants watching around his couch he was as observant as ever of 

 all the "small sweet courtesies" which marked consideration for 

 others rather than for himself even in the supreme moment of his 

 dissolution. The disciples of Socrates recalled with a sort of 

 pathetic wonder at the calm and intrepid spirit of their dying 

 master, that as the chill of the fatal hemlock was stealing to- 

 wards his heart, he uncovered his face to ask that Crito should 

 acquit him of a small debt he owed to Esculapius ; and so in like 

 manner I recall that our beloved chief did not forget in the hour of 

 his last agony to make provision for the due despatch of a letter 

 of courtesy, which on the day before he had promised to a British 

 stranger. 



And so in the full possession of all his great mental powers — in 

 his waking hours filled with high thoughts and with a peace which 

 passed all understanding ; in his sleep stealing away 



" To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell," 

 and talking even there of experiments in sound on board the 



