Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/597

Rh there given a place upon the Jury of Appeals. In the spring of 1879, by appointment of President Hayes, he became American minister to the German Empire, and in that post he remained till 1881.

After his resignation, in 1885, of the presidency of Cornell, he again crossed the Atlantic, and tarried in Europe till the spring of 1887. Returning, with renewed vigor, he had not yet entered on any serious work when the heaviest blow of his life, the unforeseen and almost instantaneous death of Mrs. White, threw all his plans into confusion. His married life had been singularly happy, and Mrs. White his almost constant companion. On the expedition to Santo Domingo he had been forced to leave her behind, and after the false rumor of the loss of the commissioners at sea, and the publication of their obituaries in the metropolitan journals, he had come back in safety to find her hair turned to snowy white. Now it was his turn to suffer, and the friends who saw him breaking beneath his grief persuaded him again to go abroad. There he lingered till the late summer of 1889; then, returning, he again took up his home in Ithaca,—where though he had declined the honorary presidency and the deanship of the School of History, which had in turn been tendered him by the university—he was still bound to Cornell by his duties as a trustee. And now, in 1892, there came to preside in his home a second wife. Miss Helen Magill, a daughter of President Magill, of Swarthmore—herself well known as scholar and as educator. In 1892 he was made, by President Harrison, minister of the United States at St. Petersburg, and, retained in that post by Mr. Cleveland, spent at the Russian capital the next two years. It was a pleasing visit, after forty years, to the scene of his earliest diplomatic experiences. His return to this country in 1895, and his appointment in January, 1896, to a place upon the important Commission of Inquiry into the Venezuelan boundary are fresh in the memory of all American readers.

In this busy life, so filled with the cares of the teacher, the politician, the man of affairs, there has been little leisure for the research that goes to the making of books; and few of the literary plans with which he began his career have been realized. His biography of Jefferson was never written. Of his long-dreamed of history of the French Revolution, for which he collected a material unequaled on this side of the Atlantic, only his admirable little monograph on Paper Money Inflation in France, and his stimulating Bibliography of the Revolution, in the book of Judge Morris, are the visible results. Of his inspiring academic lectures on the general history of modern Europe, but two or three have seen the light as magazine articles; though their topical outlines, printed for his students and by them scattered abroad, have