Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/30

 described scene to such purpose that from it I derived an impression never to be erased from my mind.

It is not given to all of us to say with such particularity and emphasis, just what we learned from each person who has touched our existences and affected the trend of our lives, as it was given to Marcus Aurelius, for instance, so that one may say that from Rusticus one received this impression, or that from Apollonius one learned this and from Alexander the Platonic that; we must rather ascribe our little store of knowledge generally to the gods. But I am sure that no one was ever long with Joseph Carter Brand, or came to know him well, without learning that rarest and most beautiful of all the graces or of all the virtues—Pity.

He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble Here, and in hell.

Perhaps it is not so much pity as sympathy that I mean, but whether it was pity or sympathy, it was that divine quality in man which enables him to imagine the sorrows of others, to understand what they feel, to suffer with them; in a word, the ability to put himself in the other fellow's place—the hall-mark, I believe, of true culture, far more than any degree or doctor's hood could possibly be.

It may have been some such feeling as this for the negroes that led him, when a young man in Kentucky, to renounce a patrimony of slaves and come north. It was not, to be sure, a very large patri