Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 November 1883 — Four Hundred Years Ago. Fame and Recognition. [ARTICLE]

Four Hundred Years Ago.

Fame and Recognition.

Two gentlemen met in Washington last winter and passed the week together. They had been classmates at college; one was now an obscure farmer, and the other is a well-known leader in national affairs, and has been a candidate for the Presidency. After observing his friend carefully for some days, the farmer said, “I honestly believe that your fame is only an annoyance to you. ” “Suppose, G—,” was the reply, “you were to enter a street-car full of st: angers, vulgar, gossiping folk, and that they should call out your name loudly, and state that you had an idiot brother and that you had been suspected of stealing in your youth, and that your son was going headlong to the dogs ? Should you like it ? Well, the country is only a big street-car, and fame in it is such personal gossip from vulgar mouths.” This was a new and startling view of the subject to the farmer, which he took home to think over. A poor invalid girl, confined for many years to a bed of suffering, wrote, out of a full heart, the poem “Nearer, my God, to Thee!” Before she died, that cry of a human soul to its Maker was echoed all over the world. “I have heard it,” a friend wrote to her, “in Cliina and from the lips of Polneysian converts.” Yet it was not until she was in her grave that even her name was known. If the gossip of the streetcar represents fame, this echo of a true word is typical of recognition. Every Sophomore at college dreams of becoming famous some day. Yet it is probable that if he is made of heroic stuff, that this noisy bruit, once gained, would be distasteful to him. But every man who is given a man’s part to play has the consciousness that he has a word to speak, which pehaps his own friends or townsmen do not understand. When it is spoken and the answer comes back to him from the great world, th at he has been understood and has won recognition from his peers, one of the keenest, highest pleasures which life yields becomes his. Fame is the senseless echo of his own name; the other a harmony which tells him that he too has struck a chord in the divine song of humanity.-*- Youth's Companion.