Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1884 — Forgotten. [ARTICLE]

Forgotten.

An American traveler in England lately asked a farmer near Stratford-on-Avon to drive him irito town. He did so with alacrity, pointing out Shakespeare’s house, etc., with much pride. The American presently spoke of his plays. “A play-actor ?” exclaimed the Englishman. “Was that all he was? I thought, at least, he had been Mayor!” On the other hand an Englishman, visiting our foremost literary man last summer, asked a conductor on the Beverly train, — “Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes lives in this village?” “Don’t know, really. Young dentist moved there this spring. Probably he’s the party. Rising young map.’’. Somebody, before Carlyle’s death, inquired of a butcher in which house on Cheyne Walk, he lived. “Car-lyle? Oh, he’s the old man where they buy three loin chops on Monday. That’s the place. They eat no meat at all.” Young men invariably look forward to fame as the chief prize of life, but almost as invariably old men who have gained it are annoyed by the personal notice which it draws upon them. This personal notoriety lasts but a shor t time, even with the most brilliant reputations. Even while a famous man is living, he is but a name to all the world to but a small circle of his own acquaintances, and when he is dead, it is only his work that survives. Biography is. after all, but one man’s account and opinion of another man, which is very oiten totally incorrect. Shakespeare, Goethe, Franklin, still are great living powers in the world, but the men themselves are but faded shadows. Even of the person of the Savior of mankind, we have no accurate knowledge ; no tradition gives us the vqjce, or look, or peculiar bearing with which He walked the streets of Jerusalem. We can almost believe that the blot'ting out of His personal life was intended to teach us the worthlessness of personal glory; and that only the work done by a maU for mankind should endure. The word spoken from the soul lives when the lips that uttered it are dust.— Youth’s Companion.