Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 April 1874 — Louls Agassiz. [ARTICLE]

Louls Agassiz.

No sounder piece ot manhood was put together in this century. It was a orreat nature, affluent, genial, overflowing with sympathy, absolutely unselfish, artless and fresh as a child’s with a poetic warmth and tenderness and richness that suggested Burns, while the steadiness, the manly energy, the simple uprightness, the goodness, were all Scott. Jlow welcome lie always was, and everywhere! How he loved children, and how they loved him! How sympathetic andvippreciative of all other talent and aspiiation! It was this sense of goodness which impressed and and charmed all who met him, and with which he warmed and dre,w his public audiences. Somehow it was transmitted beyond his personal circle, and everybody had a pride in him and a love for him. He was one of the men in whom we all see our own capacities and possibilities “writ large”— a high-water mark of human nature. The great impression that lie made upon the country is more remark' able because there are so few persons Who are capable of really estimating just what he did, or who could follow him in his scientific explanations. In this he was very different from a man who tells a story or writes a poem that everybody can enjoy. But we all felt that, if we could not understand him, he was working for us all the time; and whenever, during that life-long labor, he looked up with a smile, those who saw. in it the sweetness of that noble, manly soul, felt it to be a benediction. He was one of those over whom, when dead, we do not say, Nil niti bonum, Sor when he was among us and living and loving, nothing else could be said Magazine.