Sixty-seven years have passed away since the old pioneer began his preaching, and still he labors in the cause of his Master.  Age has not subdued his zeal or dimmed his eye.  His labors make up the history of the West.  Where he first reared his humble log-hut, smiling farms and tasteful mansions cover the fertile prairies of the West; cities and towns mark the spot where his backwoods camp-meetings drew thousands into the kingdom of God; the iron horse dashes with the speed of the wind over the boundless prairies which he first crossed with only the points of timber for his guides; the floating palaces of the West plow the streams over which he swam his horse or was ferried in a bark canoe; and stately churches stand where the little log chapels of the infant West were built by him.  It is a long and a noble life upon which he looks back, the only survivor of the heroic band who started with him to carry Christ into the Western wilds.  He has outlived all his father’s family, every member of the class he joined in 1800, every member of the Western Conference of 1804, save perhaps one or two, every member of the General Conference of 1816, the first to which he was elected, all his early bishops, every presiding elder under whom he ever ministered, and thousands of those whom he brought into the Church.  “I have lived too long,” he said, in a recent lecture; but we take issue with him.  He has not lived too long whose declining age is cheered by the glorious fruition of the seed sown in his youth and prime.  Few, indeed, are given so great a privilege; and few, having lived so long and worked so hard, can say with him, that during such a long and exposed career, “I have never been overtaken in any scandalous sin, though my shortcomings and imperfections have been without number.”  A man who can boast such a record, though he be as poor in purse as this simple-hearted backwoods preacher, has earned a Great Fortune indeed, for his treasure is one that can not be taken from him, since it is laid up in Heaven, “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

IX.

AUTHORS.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

Wherever the English language is spoken, the name of HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW has become a household word, and there is scarcely a library, however humble, but can boast a well-worn volume of his tender songs,—­songs that

     “Have power to quiet
       The restless pulse of care,
     And come like the benediction
       That follows after prayer.”