Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/34

Rh for souls which have made earth itself a holy place. His most gifted countrywoman reached Florence too late to pay to her great fellow-abolitionist a last tribute of the respect and regard which outstripped all limits of creed. At her request the writer gave her all the details of his last hours, and repeated (doubtless with faithless tears) the words above quoted, concerning his unfinished labours, adding, “To think that life is over—that work is stopped!” “And do you think,” said she, raising her eyes with a flash of rebuke, “do you think;—did he think that Theodore Parker has no work to do for God now?”

It must be so. He who recalled his soldier in the heat of the battle must have a nobler command for him on high; yet we must miss him here, and sorely his country misses him in her hour of trial. He was a great and a good man; the greatest and best, perhaps, which America has produced. He was great in many ways,—in original genius, in learning, in eloquence, and in a courage and honesty which no danger could daunt or check. In time to come his country will glory in his name, and the world will acknowledge all his gifts and powers. His true greatness, however, will in future ages rest on this—that God revealed Himself to his faithful soul, in His most adorable aspect—that he preached with undying faith, and lived out in his consecrated life, the lesson he had thus been taught—that he was worthy to be the Prophet of the greatest of all truths, the, the central truth of the universe.

When it was all over, and the great soul had gone home to God, we saw him lying, as it were, asleep, a pale flush still on his face, and his head (that noble head!) resting under a crown of the rich pink and white roses of Tuscany. The strong man, dead in the flower of manhood, seemed only slumbering on a warm summer day. Never was the “rapture of repose” more legible upon the face of death. It seemed as if God had said, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Well hast thou spent thy talents ten times ten!” A few days later we followed him, to hear, as he had desired, the Beatitudes of the Gospels read for his sole funeral service, over his grave, in the beautiful Campo Santo of Florence. It seemed well that he should sleep in such a spot, under a sky as cloudless as his faith, and where the cypresses of Italy, like nature's spires, stand pointing from a bright world below to a yet brighter heaven. As