Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/44

38 bright at all times and under all circumstances, when not suffering from some specific illness, as John Boyle O'Reilly. A man who could take his canoe and paddle it from the head of the Connecticut river into Long Island sound was able to do all the work he needed and ought to. The man that swam the angry ocean for miles to get his liberty was a man that could not be overworked on God's footstool.

But accident has taken him from us, and left us to think whether a man who achieves so much in the twenty years,—which time it takes a well-educated lawyer in England to get his first case,—what would he not have done if he had been left to us? What would not Ireland have received of counsel and advice? What would England receive of stern rebuke and the finding out of her errors? For what would America in her politics not have been indebted; what would history and song and story not have gained, if John Boyle O'Reilly could have lived on with us to the age of Gladstone the statesman, Bancroft the historian, or the poets, our own poet, and the poet Tennyson?

Twenty years multiplied in ever-increasing proportion by twenty years more, and twenty years more, and a fraction, and what would not John Boyle O'Reilly, if God had spared him to us, have achieved for his country, his adopted country, and for the world?