“Sir Launcelot! ther thou lyest; thou were never matched of none earthly knights hands; thou were the truest freende to thy lover that ever bestrood horse; and thou were the kindest man that ever strooke with sword; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortall foe that ever put spere in the rest.” La Morte d’Arthur.

In the year 1828 there was a young man of eighteen at work upon a farm in Lexington, performing bodily labor to the extent of twenty hours in a day sometimes, and that for several days together, and at other times studying intensely when work was less pressing.  Thirty years after, that same man sat in the richest private library in Boston, working habitually from twelve to seventeen hours a day in severer toil.  The interval was crowded with labors, with acquisitions, with reproaches, with victories, with honors; and he who experienced all this died exhausted at the end of it, less than fifty years old, but looking seventy.  That man was Theodore Parker.

The time is far distant when out of a hundred different statements of contemporaries some calm biographer will extract sufficient materials for a true picture of the man; and meanwhile all that each can do is to give fearlessly his own honest impressions, and so tempt others to give theirs.  Of the multitude of different photographers, each perchance may catch some one trait without which the whole portraiture would have remained incomplete; and the time to secure this is now, while his features are fresh in our minds.  It is a daring effort, but it needs to be made.

Yet Theodore Parker was so strong and self-sufficing upon his own ground, he needed so little from any other, while giving so freely to all, that one would hardly venture to add anything to the autobiographies he has left, but for the high example he set of fearlessness in dealing with the dead.  There may be some whose fame is so ill-established, that one shrinks from speaking of them precisely as one saw them; but this man’s place is secure, and that friend best praises him who paints him just as he seemed.  To depict him as he was must be the work of many men, and no single observer, however intimate, need attempt it.

The first thing that strikes an observer, in listening to the words of public and private feeling elicited by his departure, is the predominance in them all of the sentiment of love.  His services, his speculations, his contests, his copious eloquence, his many languages, these come in as secondary things, but the predominant testimony is emotional.  Men mourn the friend even more than the warrior.  No fragile and lovely girl, fading untimely into heaven, was ever more passionately beloved than this white-haired and world-weary man.  As he sat in his library, during his lifetime, he was not only the awakener of a thousand intellects, but the centre of a thousand hearts;—­he furnished the natural home for every foreign refugee, every hunted slave, every stray thinker, every vexed and sorrowing woman.  And never was there one of these who went away uncomforted, and from every part of this broad nation their scattered hands now fling roses upon his grave.