This boy was an officer, and those were only private soldiers.  I learned a lesson that I will never forget.  Greatness consists not in holding some office; greatness really consists in doing some great deed with little means, in the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life; that is true greatness.  He who can give to this people better streets, better homes, better schools, better churches, more religion, more of happiness, more of God, he that can be a blessing to the community in which he lives to-night will be great anywhere, but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives will never be great anywhere on the face of God’s earth.  “We live in deeds, not years, in feeling, not in figures on a dial; in thoughts, not breaths; we should count time by heart throbs, in the cause of right.”  Bailey says:  “He most lives who thinks most.”

If you forget everything I have said to you, do not forget this, because it contains more in two lines than all I have said.  Bailey says:  “He most lives who thinks most, who feels the noblest, and who acts the best.”

VICTOR HUGO

HONORE DE BALZAC

Delivered at the Funeral of Balzac, August 20, 1850.

Gentlemen:  The man who now goes down into this tomb is one of those to whom public grief pays homage.

In one day all fictions have vanished.  The eye is fixed not only on the heads that reign, but on heads that think, and the whole country is moved when one of those heads disappears.  To-day we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius.

Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace our epoch will leave across the future.

Balzac was one of that powerful generation of writers of the nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, as the illustrious Pleiad of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu,—­as if in the development of civilization there were a law which gives conquerors by the intellect as successors to conquerors by the sword.

Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best.  This is not the place to tell all that constituted this splendid and sovereign intelligence.  All his books form but one book,—­a book living, luminous, profound, where one sees coming and going and marching and moving, with I know not what of the formidable and terrible, mixed with the real, all our contemporary civilization;—­a marvelous book which the poet entitled “a comedy” and which he could have called history; which takes all forms and all style, which surpasses Tacitus and Suetonius; which traverses Beaumarchais and reaches Rabelais;—­a book which realizes observation and imagination, which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most sombre and tragic ideal.  Unknown to himself, whether he wished it or not, whether he consented or not, the author of this immense and strange work is one of the strong race of Revolutionist writers.  Balzac goes straight to the goal.