It is quite fitting to follow this sketch of one noble veteran with a brief reminiscence of an equally noble one, who bore the name of an Episcopalian, although he was very undenominational in his broad sympathies.  Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg was one of the most apostolic men I have ever known in appearance and spirit.  His gray head all men knew in New York.  He commanded attention everywhere by his genial face and hearty manner of speech.  I used to meet him at the anniversaries of the Five Points Home of Industry.  Everybody loved him at first sight.  All the world knows he was the founder of St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, and the extensive institutions of charity at St. Johnsland, on Long Island.  Of his hymns the most popular is

   “I would not live alway,” etc.

It was first written as an impromptu for a lady’s album, and afterwards amended into its present form.

In his later years he regarded the tone of that hymn as too lugubrious; and in a pleasant note to me he said:  “Paul’s ‘For me to live is Christ’ is far better than Job’s ‘I would not live alway.’” My favorite among his productions is the one on Noah’s Dove, commencing, “O cease, my wandering soul”; but the man was greater than any song he ever wrote.  As he was a bachelor he lived in his St. Luke’s Hospital; and once, when he was carrying a tray of dishes down to the kitchen and some one protested, the patriarch replied:  “Why not; what am I but a waiter here in the Lord’s hotel?” When very near his end the Chaplain of the hospital prayed at his bedside for his recovery.  “Let us have an understanding about this,” said Muhlenberg.  “You are asking God to restore me, and I am asking God to take me home.  There must not be any contradiction in our prayers, for it is evident that He cannot answer them both.”  This was characteristic of his bluff frankness, as well as of his heavenly-mindedness—­he “would not live alway.”

In July, 1881, I was visiting Stockholm, and was invited to go on an excursion to the University of Upsala with Dr. Samuel F. Smith.  I had never before met my celebrated countryman about whom his Harvard classmate, Oliver Wendell Holmes, once wrote: 

   “And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith—­
   Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith;
   But he shouted a song for the brave and the free—­
   Just read on his medal—­’My Country—­of Thee’”

The song he thus shouted was written for the Fourth of July celebration, in Park Street Church, Boston, in 1832, and has become our national hymn.  When I met the genial old man in Sweden, and travelled with him for several days, he was on his way home from a missionary tour in India and Burmah.  He told me that he had heard the Burmese and Telugus sing in their native tongue his grand missionary hymn, “The Morning Light is Breaking.”  He was a native Bostonian, and was born a few days before Ray Palmer.  He was a Baptist pastor, editor, college professor, and spent the tranquil summer evening of his life at Newton, Mass.; and at a railway station in Boston, by sudden heart failure, he was translated to his heavenly home.  He illustrated his own sweet evening hymn, “Softly Fades the Twilight Ray.”