Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Methodist Review, 1912, Vol. 94: Bimonthly
As a means of culture and a source of inspiration biography is a most fascinating and profitable study. Nothing so deepens sympathy, broadens knowledge, or increases our admiration for noble achievements; for the next thing to being great or excellent is to admire those rare qualities in another. On an important occasion Dean Stanley said, referring to Arnold of Rugby, his idol and oracle both in one, The lapse of years has only served to deepen in me the conviction that no gift can be more valuable than the recollection and inspiration of a great character work ing.on our own But, while biography is'delightful and in structive, the writing of it is not always unmixed enjoyment. Such is the delicacy of the task, and so weighty are the respon31 bilities inseparable from it, that we may easily imagine why the wise and prudent instinctively shrink from undertaking it, un less impelled to do so by love for the departed or by a sense of duty to the living. For, who can enter into another's personality? Who can lay bare the secrets of. Another's heart? Who can in 'terpret its motives, experience its joys or its sorrows, its unreal ized dreams or vague longings in the midst of the world's welter? Who can measure the impact upon it of the universe of men and things, the subtle in?uence of heredity, early education, physical and social surroundings, and, failing in all this, as he certainly must, yet venture to describe a human being when he has, passed into the Eternal Silence? There are but two biographers, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, who can tell the story of a man's or a.
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