XI.

IN MEMORIAM.

Joseph Henry.

ADDRESS AT THE MEMORIAL MEETING HELD IN THE HALL OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, TUESDAY EVENING, JAN. 16, 1879.

M

XI.

JOSEPH HENRY.

"And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye
Fades not the broader outlook of the gods."

R. PRESIDENT,-In the presence of these fathers of science, who have honored this occasion with their wisdom and eloquence, I can do but little more than express my gratitude for the noble contribution they have made to this national expression of love and reverence. So completely have they covered the ground, so fully have they sketched the great life which we celebrate, that nothing is left but to linger a moment over the tributes they have offered, and select here and there a special excellence to carry away as a lasting memorial.

No page of human history is so instructive and significant as the record of those early influences which develop the character and direct the lives of eminent men. To every man of great original power, there comes in early youth a moment of

sudden discovery, of self-recognition, when his own nature is revealed to himself, when he catches, for the first time, a strain of that immortal song to which his own spirit answers, and which becomes thenceforth and forever the inspiration of his life,

"Like noble music unto noble words."

More than a hundred years ago, in Strasbourg on the Rhine, in obedience to the commands of his father, a German lad was reluctantly studying the mysteries of the civil law, but feeding his spirit as best he could upon the formal and artificial poetry of his native land, when a page of William Shakespeare met his eye, and changed the whole current of his life. Abandoning the law, he created and crowned with an immortal name the grandest epoch of German literature.

Recording his own experience, he says,—

"At the first touch of Shakespeare's genius I made the glad confession that something inspiring hovered above me. . . . The first page of his that I read made me his for life; and when I had finished a single play, I stood like one born blind on whom a miraculous hand bestows sight in a moment. I saw, I felt, in the most vivid manner, that my existence was infinitely expanded."