“But why should one go to slaughter houses, why should one hear hogs squeal?” I could give no reason, so the matter rested.

Mr. Arnold’s Old Testament favorite was certainly Isaiah:  at least his frequent quotations from that great poet, as he called him, led one to this conclusion.  I found in my tour around the world that the sacred books of other religions had been stripped of the dross that had necessarily accumulated around their legends.  I remembered Mr. Arnold saying that the Scriptures should be so dealt with.  The gems from Confucius and others which delight the world have been selected with much care and appear as “collects.”  The disciple has not the objectionable accretions of the ignorant past presented to him.

The more one thinks over the matter, the stronger one’s opinion becomes that the Christian will have to follow the Eastern example and winnow the wheat from the chaff—­worse than chaff, sometimes the positively pernicious and even poisonous refuse.  Burns, in the “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” pictures the good man taking down the big Bible for the evening service: 

    “He wales a portion with judicious care.”

We should have those portions selected and use the selections only.  In this, and much besides, the man whom I am so thankful for having known and am so favored as to call friend, has proved the true teacher in advance of his age, the greatest poetic teacher in the domain of “the future and its viewless things.”

I took Arnold down from our summer home at Cresson in the Alleghanies to see black, smoky Pittsburgh.  In the path from the Edgar Thomson Steel Works to the railway station there are two flights of steps to the bridge across the railway, the second rather steep.  When we had ascended about three quarters of it he suddenly stopped to gain breath.  Leaning upon the rail and putting his hand upon his heart, he said to me: 

“Ah, this will some day do for me, as it did for my father.”

I did not know then of the weakness of his heart, but I never forgot this incident, and when not long after the sad news came of his sudden death, after exertion in England endeavoring to evade an obstacle, it came back to me with a great pang that our friend had foretold his fate.  Our loss was great.  To no man I have known could Burns’s epitaph upon Tam Samson be more appropriately applied: 

    “Tam Samson’s weel-worn clay here lies: 
    Ye canting zealots, spare him! 
    If honest worth in heaven rise,
    Ye’ll mend or ye win near him.”

The name of a dear man comes to me just here, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Boston, everybody’s doctor, whose only ailment toward the end was being eighty years of age.  He was a boy to the last.  When Matthew Arnold died a few friends could not resist taking steps toward a suitable memorial to his memory.  These friends quietly provided the necessary sum, as no public appeal could be thought of.  No one