end would be gained, to break up the charm and cheer of this his belief?  Or to dispel that other confidence, which so helped him to bear earth’s trials, that one day he should join all the spirits of the just made perfect, and all the high angels in heaven, and, on the plane of that golden gamut, they should sing together their hymns of joy and praise, in that same, good, old tune, from those same star-notes, which a thousand centuries should not deflect nor transpose from their first order within those everlasting staves and bars!

If the spirit’s faith be allowed such wide confidences as these; if it may carry up into the invisible and infinite so many precious relics from the wreck of time, so many human circumstances and associations, why may it not take with it, to hang up in its heaven, photographs of those earthly localities rendered immortal here by the lives of good and great men?  Such a life is a sun, and it casts a disk of light upon the very earth on which it shines; not that flashy circle which the lens of the microscope casts upon the opposite wall, to show how scarcely visible mites may be magnified; but a soft and steady illumination that does not dim under the beating storms and bleaching dews of centuries, but grows brighter and brighter, as if the seed-rays that made it first multiplied themselves from year to year.  The earth becomes more and more thickly dotted with these permanent disks of light, and each is visited by pilgrims, who go and stand with reverence and admiration within the cheering circle.  Shakespeare’s thought-life threw out a brilliant illumination, of wide circumference, at Stratford-upon-Avon, and no locality in England bears a biograph more venerated than the birth-place of the great poet.  His thought-life was a sun that will never set as long as this above us shines.  It is rising every year to new generations that never saw its rays before.  When he laid down his pen, at the end of his last drama, the whole English-speaking race in both hemispheres did not number twice the present population of London.  Now, seventy-five millions, peopling mighty continents, speak the tongue he raised to the grandest of all earth’s speeches; and those who people the antipodes claim to offer the best homage to his genius.  Thus it will go on to the end of time.  As the language he clothed with such power and might shall spread itself over the earth, and be spoken, too, by races born to another tongue, his life-rays will permeate the minds of countless myriads, and the more widely they diverge and the farther they reach, the brighter and warmer will be the glow and the flow of that disk of light that embosoms and illumines his birth-place in England.