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children.

We live in cor acighbors, and in their neighbors, and in their neighbors.

As when you throw pebbles into water, the lines which they make go D widening, and following each other in endless succession, in life the circles of things are diffused and widened; and toough you die, your works follow on, and keep working. Your nature is not gone: it is transplanted into others.

When the first Rhode Island Greening was found to be so. rare and beautiful an apple, men took grafts from the tree, and now there are Rhode Island Greenings in almost every well-ordered orchard on the continent; and they all came from this original tree, little slips being taken from it and grafted into one tree of another kind, and another, and another, until this variety, after many generations, has become one of the most widespread that is known in this land. And who can tell what baskets and bins of luscious apples shall be gathered in the years and years which are to come as the fruit of that one seedling tree?

One noble man, one noble woman, one person who has the quality of fruit, may graft it, by unconscious influence, upon some other person, and that other person upon others, and so on. Thus your courage may be reverberating for years, and your aspiration may be gleaming and glancing again in endless continued reflections, after you are gone. Blessed are the dead who die in Christ (if they have lived in Christ before they died), for their works follow them.

This quality of unconsciousness has often very affecting instances in it. When the then reigning king of Germany was overthrown by Napoleon, and his kingdom was trodden under foot by that behemoth, and the people were almost exterminated, his queen Louisa so bore the sorrows of her people that her own life broke down under it; and she rested. And the great Rauch carved her in marble; and in the environs of Berlin you may pass through a twilight grove, and enter a little sequestered temple, and through an ante-chamber with windows of glass that sheds down a blue light and gives an unworldly atmosphere, you shall pass into a recess where pure light comes through an unstained window, and where

you seem almost to have entered the other life; and there lying is the monument of marble in which she is represented as at last having found rest. There is such an indescribable sweetness in her face, there is such a triumph of peace on it, that no man who ever looked upon it could have done it, I think, without wet eyes; and no man that ever saw it will forget it.

I brought home an engraving which has happily transferred the spirit of the original to paper, and have it hanging in my study; and through troubles and sorrows that dead queen's marble has sent out such cheer and such sweetness of peace that I can scarcely think of her or hear her name without reverence and adoration. She never spoke a word nor sent a message; she did not even make her own statue; but the sculptor cut it from her life and gave to it the expression of peace; and that peace, through night and darkness, through storms and battles, through revolutions and wars, has come down to us; and I am a witness, for one, as hundreds of others might be also, that it has been a strength to my life, and the joy of many a turbid hour.

Now, that which marble can do, how much more can the living soul or the living face do? The peace of God that passeth all understanding does not alone come to us directly from the bosom of God: it comes to us by reflection from many a venerable father's face; from the face of many a mother, serene, just, and all-loving; from the face of many a faithful friend. They who live sequestered, and do nothing but shine, may think themselves useless; but, dying, they sow more seeds than twenty generations can reap—and not the less because those seeds are invisible.

But, also, the formative work, aside from the unconscious-that which we plan, purpose, and execute—remains, or may remain after we are gone. All that which men put forth in the work of education, the repression that parents exercise, the self-denial which they teach their children, the ideas and habits which they graft into them, the whole sphere of the household work, deliberate and intentional -this abides. The father and the mother die; but the group of children go forth; and the first instinct of those

who are grown up, and have themselves become parents, is to reproduce upon their children that which they remember gratefully of their own parents' discipline. And so, wise parents transmit their habits of training by their children down through many generations. They may be forgotten in the succession, but their work is going on. And we are ourselves what we are by reason of those who were our ancestors in Europe or on this continent. Many and many a sturdy old Puritan father or mother is forgotten, from whose loins we sprung; and we are, to-day, what we are, in that which is good and noble, through their influence.

We cannot tell what our children inherit from us. Something of bad, doubtless, and much of good, doubtless; but how much we are doing we shall not know until we see it in the other life. Our direct influence upon souls around about us is of a kind which we cannot measure now. We often think that those who respond to our suggestions, and are visibly modified by us, show efficient work; but many and many a tough nature does not respond easily, and yet the work is none the less real. The seed does not always come up when you sow it. Some seed does not grow the same season that it is planted. Some seed needs to be cracked by the winter's cold and frost. Some seeds lie in the ground two or more years before they come up. Seeds may be buried a thousand years, and then come up. There are many natures that do not take on influence easily. It lies in them until, by and by, storms or troubles bring it forth.

There are now before me, I do not doubt, multitudes of men and women who can testify that God has blessed to them the labor of some parent, some pastor, some classleader, some obscure and humble friend, working by their side, on the farm, or in the shop, long after the benefactor had gone. You can look back and say, "I see the tendencies that he planted in me, and that now have brought forth fruit in me to the honor of God, and to my soul's regeneration. I can see that this work was begun by him in such and such a manner; and he died and knew not what he had done; but I am to-day what I am, in part, through the blessing of God, by that person's fidelity." I can trace not a

few in the long past who left their impression upon me. They never knew it until they rose to heaven. It may be given to us there to see what we have really been about in life. Somewhere, at some time, all good work will avail. It is not lost.

This after-work is signally manifest in those who have founded and conducted institutions, which are artificial persons, as it were, raised up to perpetuate certain influences or certain functions. Schools, academies, universities-these are organizations of beneficence; and one man may, by wise method, arrangement and benefaction, mix himself in such a way with all the noblest of generations which are yet to come, that his heart-beat will be felt in the world for a thousand years.

When the early fathers got together in their poverty to found Yale and Harvard and Princeton, do you think they knew what a band of men-what lawyers, what judges, what ministers, what civilians of every kind, what noble citizens and patriots-they were standing, if not fathers, yet godfathers to? And all that comes from these fountains which they opened is part and parcel of their life. So they are not dead. There was a time when Wolsey controlled the great kingdom of Great Britain, and substantially managed the king and his courtiers; and his influence was felt far and wide; and in the height of his power, almost as a recreation, he founded Cardinal College, after his fall named Christ College, in Oxford; and now all his control of England during the time that he lived is as a grain of mustard seed compared with the work that has been and is done by this single institution, which is a fountain from which has flowed his munificence for hundreds and hundreds of years in the past, and from which it will flow for hundreds and hundreds of years in the future. And we are ourselves beneficiaries of this historic man, who abused himself and who has been much abused. As the winds, no matter where they come from, wave every tree and leaf on their passage, so, no matter where knowledge springs from, it goes bearing benefaction to every living soul to whom it comes; and the noble fruits of noble natures that spring from this great work of

Wolsey are yet in the world. We are ourselves a part of the great band of those who have been blessed by him.

Peter Cooper will soon die, but his Cooper Union is immortal; for when its foundations crumble, or are toppled down by war or by the earthquake, there will be influences that it has sent forth into the world which cannot be separated from the world's history.

They who build libraries, such as the Lenox Library or the Astor Library of New York, are among the most beneficent of citizens. No other labor of their hands is to be compared with that by which they have established these great fountains of knowledge which are free to all.

He who opens in a village a free reading-room, and gives it to his fellow-citizens, has made himself imr rtal, because he has become one of the men who have set on foot influences which shall go on working for hundreds and hundreds of years after he is dead. His work follows him.

He who establishes a church that goes down through generations opens a fountain that shall bring daylight to thousands of men; and he himself will never be lost out of the world.

He who builds a hospital for the sick, he who makes a refuge for the incurable, for the poor, or for those who have no home, where they may bring forth their children, dying or living; he who, seeing misery, provides a remedy for ithe becomes a benefactor and a philanthropist; and his work, being established, will go on from generation to generation.

He who establishes a savings bank, and teaches the gospel of economy to thrice ten thousand poor; or he who establishes an insurance company, and teaches men to insure their lives or their property, and leads them to form habits of foresight, is working beneficently upon his race.

There is nothing so humble but that it has its effect upon men. There is nothing that makes men more careful, more frugal, more prudent, more sympathetic, more co-operative, more courageous, or more enterprising, than these things; and there are none of them, no matter how humble, and no matter how little regard is paid to them, that are not admirable. And men, working wherever they may be, even for the

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