Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/38

32 by this large-hearted, generous soul—this manly man among manly men.

It has been said that he died too young. How true that seems to us, and how it proves that death loves a shining mark. How many times upon the battlefield and in our every-day life at home death has called for the best, when it has seemed to us Ave could have named others who might have been better spared.

I once stood by the bier of a friend of mine who died at exactly the age at which John Boyle O'Reilly left us. The clergyman told us that the man died of overwork. In a limited sense he was right; in a broader view he was radically wrong.

One of the most curious things to me in human nature is to notice the way in which men wake up at maturity and show the qualities with which they are endowed. From out of the ranks of many thousands of men of ordinary capacity comes a rare man. He has ambition, industry, application, persistency, genius. He seems to carry two hundred pounds of steam where the ordinary man has one pound. He works day and night with a force and with an impulse which the ordinary man never feels, never realizes, and can scarcely comprehend. He knows he is working too hard, and that he cannot last; but he can no more halt than the water can cease to flow over the Falls of Niagara. The pages of history, all through the ages, are dotted with