Again, this Barzillai of the nineteenth century shows us a more sensible way of monumental and epitaphal commemoration.  It is natural to want to be remembered.  It would not be a pleasant thought to us or to any one to feel that the moment you are out of the world you would be forgotten.  If the executors of Peter Cooper should build on his grave a monument that would cost $20,000,000, it would not so well commemorate him as that monument at the junction of Third and Fourth Avenues, New York.  How few people would pass along the silent sepulcher as compared with those great numbers that will ebb and flow around Cooper Institute in the ages to come!  Of the tens of thousands to be educated there, will there be one so stupid as not to know who built it, and what a great heart he had, and how he struggled to achieve a fortune, but always mastered that fortune, and never allowed the fortune to master him?  What is a monument of Aberdeen granite beside a monument of intellect and souls?  What is an epitaph of a few words cut by a sculptor’s chisel beside the epitaph of coming generations and hundreds writing his praise?  Beautiful and adorned beyond all the crypts and catacombs and shrines of the dead!  But the superfluous and inexcusable expense of catafalque and sarcophagus and tumulus and necropolis the world over, put into practical help, would have sent intelligence into every dark mind and provided a home for every wanderer.  The pyramids of Egypt, elevated at vast expense, were the tombs of kings—­their names now obliterated.  But the monuments of good last forever.  After “Old Mortality” has worn out his chisel in reviving the epitaphs on old tombstones, the names of those who have helped others will be held in everlasting remembrance.  The fires of the Judgment Day will not crumble off one of the letters.  The Sabbath-school teacher builds her monument in the heavenly thrones of her converted scholars.  Geo. Mueller’s monument is the orphan-houses of England.  Handel’s monument was his “Hallelujah Chorus.”  Peabody’s monument, the library of his native village and the schools for educating the blacks in the South.  They who give or pray for a church have their monument in all that sacred edifice ever accomplishes.  John Jay had his monument in free America.  Wilberforce his monument in the piled up chains of a demolished slave trade.  Livingstone shall have his monument in regenerated Africa.  Peter Cooper has his monument in all the philanthropies which for the last quarter of a century he encouraged by his one great practical effort for the education of the common people.  That is a fame worth having.  That is a style of immortality for which any one without degradation may be ambitious.  Fill all our cities with such monuments till the last cripple has his limb straightened, and the last inebriate learns the luxury of cold water, and the last outcast comes home to his God, and the last abomination is extirpated, and “Paradise Lost” has become “Paradise Regained.”