“Strive constantly to concentrate yourself,” said the laborious Goethe, “never dissipate your powers; incessant activity, of whatever kind, leads finally to bankruptcy.”  But Theodore Parker’s whole endeavor was to multiply his channels, and he exhausted his life in the effort to do all men’s work.  He was a hard man to relieve, to help, or to cooperate with.  Thus, the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review” began with quite a promising corps of contributors; but when it appeared that its editor, if left alone, would willingly undertake all the articles,—­science, history, literature, everything,—­of course the others yielded to inertia and dropped away.  So, some years later, when some of us met at his room to consult on a cheap series of popular theological works, he himself was so rich in his own private plans that all the rest were impoverished; nothing could be named but he had been planning just that for years, and should by-and-by get leisure for it, and there really was not enough left to call out the energies of any one else.  Not from any petty egotism, but simply from inordinate activity, he stood ready to take all the parts.

In the same way he distanced everybody; every companion-scholar found soon that it was impossible to keep pace with one who was always accumulating and losing nothing.  Most students find it necessary to be constantly forgetting some things to make room for later arrivals; but the peculiarity of his memory was that he let nothing go.  I have more than once heard him give a minute analysis of the contents of some dull book read twenty years before, and have afterwards found the statement correct and exhaustive.  His great library,—­the only private library I have ever seen which reminded one of the Astor,—­although latterly collected more for public than personal uses, was one which no other man in the nation, probably, had sufficient bibliographical knowledge single-handed to select, and we have very few men capable of fully appreciating its scholarly value, as it stands.  It seems as if its possessor, putting all his practical and popular side into his eloquence and action, had indemnified himself by investing all his scholarship in a library of which less than a quarter of the books were in the English language.

All unusual learning, however, brings with it the suspicion of superficiality; and in this country, where, as Mr. Parker himself said, “every one gets a mouthful of education, but scarce one a full meal,”—­where every one who makes a Latin quotation is styled “a ripe scholar,”—­it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the true from the counterfeit.  It is, however, possible to apply some tests.  I remember, for instance, that one of the few undoubted classical scholars, in the old-fashioned sense, whom New England has seen,—­the late John Glen King of Salem,—­while speaking with very limited respect of the acquirements of Rufus Choate in this direction, and with utter contempt of those of Daniel Webster, always became enthusiastic on coming to Theodore Parker.  “He is the only man,” said Mr. King more than once to the writer, “with whom I can sit down and seriously discuss a disputed reading and find him familiar with all that has been written upon it.”  Yet Greek and Latin were only the preliminaries of Mr. Parker’s scholarship.