MARK TWAIN 



"Si fractus illabatur orbis, 

 Impavidv/m ferient ruinae." 



By HOLDRIDGIC OZRO CoLLINS, LL.D. 



SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEA/[ENS, known the world 

 over as Mark Twain, was one of the great men of our 

 country : 



Great in his scorn of all that was detestable and ignoble; 

 great in his denunciations of fraud and graft in private and 

 public corporations; great in his arraignment of political par- 

 ties which violated their solemn pledges ; great in his castigation 

 of those in public office, from the highest to the lowest, who 

 proved untrue and false to the trusts reposed in them, and great 

 as a second Sir Walter Scott in rendering unto Csesar the things 

 that are Caesar's. No one who has read his serious commen- 

 taries upon our own times and his philosophical essays can fail 

 to appreciate the pulchritude of that soul, the moving factor of 

 his nobility of action. 



With the loving and tender heart of a woman, an adverse 

 fate took from him his boy ; the daughter in whom were cen- 

 tered all his hopes for a happy future, and the wife who had 

 been his companion and solace for a too short time;' and he 

 pursued the remainder of his journey, a weary, sorrowful and 

 broken-hearted man. 



Truly indeed, was he, as Homer says of Ulysses, a man of 

 many wanderings and many sufferings and had seen many cities 

 and knew the hearts of men. 



Who can read without emotion the lines he caused to be 

 graved upon the tomb of the lost daughter, 



"Warm summer sun, shine kindly here, 

 A'Varni southern wind, blow softly here ; 

 Green sod above, lie light, lie light. 



Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night." 



To him, as has come to all of us who have lost, came the 

 great problem, why should those be taken from us, in the 

 happy days of their youth and loveliness, when their presence 

 was a joy and made life a sweet content, while others, whose 

 existence is a shame, live a scourge to the world? Their pre- 

 mature death "is one of those brutal facts of human history 



29 



