than the devotion of this man to his object.  No crusader was ever so devoted to his vow, no lover to his mistress, as he was to his purpose of showing mankind what to do with India-rubber.  The doorplate of his office was made of it; his portrait was painted upon and framed with it; his book, as we have seen, was wholly composed of it; and his mind, by night and day, was surcharged with it.  He never went to sleep without having within reach writing materials and the means of making a light, so that, if he should have an idea in the night, he might be able to secure it.  Some of his best ideas, he used to say, were saved to mankind by this precaution.

It is not well for any man to be thus absorbed in his object.  To Goodyear, whose infirm constitution peculiarly needed repose and recreation, it was disastrous, and at length fatal.  It is well with no man who does riot play as well as work.  Fortunately, we are all beginning to understand this.  We are beginning to see that a devotion to the business of life which leaves no reserve of force and time for social pleasures and the pursuit of knowledge, diminishes even our power to conduct business with the sustained and intelligent energy requisite for a safe success.  That is a melancholy passage in one of Theodore Parker’s letters, written in the premature decline of his powers, in which he laments that he had not, like Franklin, joined a club, and taken an occasional ramble with young companions in the country, and played billiards with them in the evening.  He added, that he intended to lead a better life in these particulars for the future; but who can reform at forty-seven?  And the worst of it is, that ill-health, the natural ally of all evil, favors intensity, lessening both our power and our inclination to get out of the routine that is destroying us.  Goodyear, always sick, had been for so many years the slave of his pursuit, he had been so spurred on by necessity, and lured by partial success, that, when at last he might have rested, he could not.

It does not become us, however, who reap the harvest, to censure him who wore himself out in sowing the seed.  The harvest is great,—­greater than any but he anticipated.  His friends know now that he never over-estimated the value of his invention.  They know now what he meant when he said that no one but himself would take the trouble to apply his material to the thousand uses of which it was capable, because each new application demanded a course of experiments that would discourage any one who entered upon it only with a view to profit.  The India-rubber manufacture, since his death, has increased greatly in extent, but not much in other respects, and some of the ideas which he valued most remain undeveloped.  He died, for example, in the conviction that sails of India-rubber cloth would finally supersede all others.  He spent six months and five thousand dollars in producing one or two specimens, which were tried and answered their purpose well; but he was unable to bring his sail-making process to an available perfection.  The sole difficulty was to make his sails as light as those of cloth.  He felt certain of being able to accomplish this; but in the multiplicity of his objects and the pressure of his embarrassments, he was compelled to defer the completion of his plans to a day that never came.