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260. What he considered his solemn duty before science and before his people was more important in his own mind than the question of his health, which finally refused to withstand the terrific strain to which the tireless brain and the indomitable will of the scientist subjected it.

And each of these giants, their minds clear to the very end, succeeded in crystallizing the tremendous masses of thoughts and ideas and experiences that constituted their spiritual and intellectual being into small, priceless pearls—the last words they pronounced on their death beds.

A few minutes before his death, in that small railroad station which for a time attracted the gaze of the whole world, Tolstoy pronounced his last great words, "the soft, sad, gentle final chord of a great symphony," as Kuprin has called it: "The hero of my story, whom I love with my whole soul, whom I have attempted to reproduce in all his beauty, and who has always been, is, and ever will be beautiful, is truth." The great thinker's whole philosophy of life, so simple, so beautiful, yet so fraught with the mighty significance of his ceaseless quest, is in the one little sentence that his lips whispered a few minutes before death sealed them forever.

Kovalevsky's last words, too, are so expressive of his whole life, so ail-inclusively descriptive of his whole activity, that they are really a summary of everything he thought and said and did during the decades of his scientific and public life. To the few friends who were at his bed-side, to those loving hearts tortured by the maddeningly painful realization of the inevitable, he gave his last precept: "Love liberty, and equality, and progress."

All his life Kovalevsky marched under a standard, upon which were inscribed those great words. All his life he followed them unflinchingly, and with them carried new ideas, new inspirations to those around him. All his life was spent for the vindication of these fundamental values of human life, for the disclosing of their sterling worth to his countrymen. These three great principles, which lie at the basis of the highest civilization that the world has reached in its evolution, the Aryan civilization of the West, were not welcome guests in Russia during the greater part of Kovalevsky's career. But they were his creed in life, his great guiding star, which he had followed to the West, outside of the boundaries of his dearly beloved native land—an exile for over two decades. During this whole period he did everything in his power to make those mighty principles personnae gratae in Russia; all his efforts were directed towards gaining for them the right of citizenship in the eastern-most of European countries. He was the direct and undisputed heir of those mighty intellects that strove, a half-century ago, to bring Russia into a close communion with the West. Only, he was more fortunate than they, for within the limits of his lifetime came the first throes of regeneration, the period of Titanic struggle and suffering, so pregnant with the promise of future achievement. When the first beacon light