Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/28

Rh as served to keep his mind steadily balanced. It has been already said that he understood ten languages. Of their literature, ancient and modern, his amazing knowledge will be sufficiently proved by the notes appended to the present volume. It would probably be difficult to parallel, save in Germany, a scholarship at once so varied and so recondite. For the carefulness and minuteness thereof also, let his recension of De Wette's treatise on the Old Testament testify.

But if God had endowed Parker with a noble intellect and he had honestly multiplied his five talents to ten, there was yet a greater gift which he possessed in still richer measure. The strong, clear head was second to the warm, true heart. Parker loved his friends with a devotion of which men in our day so rarely give proof, that we claim it as the privilege of a woman to know its happiness, albeit such love becomes as much the manliness of a man as the womanliness of a woman. His tenderness to his wife and to all around him broke out in a thousand little gentle cares and delicate thoughtfulnesses continually. No man was ever more beloved in the happy circle admitted to the intimacy of his home, and every mail brought him from far away lands letters of gratitude and affection. His immense power of human sympathy made itself felt so strongly, that it is said no clergyman of any creed, in our day, ever received so many confidences and confessions. No wonder that when the end of that loving life drew near he said to the writer, “I would fain be allowed to stay a little longer here if it pleased God,—the world is so interesting and friends so dear!” At the last of all, when his noble intellect was sinking under the clouds of approaching night, his tender affections were still lingering, anxiously careful for the gentle wife weeping by his side, and he dreamed that he had found comfort for her, telling us with brightening looks that though he was dying in Florence there was another Theodore Parker in America who would carry on his work and be her support and consolation.

Parker was brave, eloquent, learned, and warm-hearted all in an exceptional degree. He was also a man of fine poetic taste and love of art, and of the most refined and winning manners. There seemed no one human pursuit of an elevated kind in which he could not take interest. The element of pure joyous wit and humour was overflowing in him. Even