THE RANDALL FAMILY 1 95
wince to share those letters with the world ; I will not pre- tend to say it does not. But my friend is dead, and my debt to him and to his memory is great. Proudly disdain- ful as he was of fame, I do not seek that for him now. But the history of this human world of ours is not so bright with luminaries of the spiritual order that it can afford to lose the light of this candle, though so long hid- den under a bushel. Much is due to the sacred privacy of a deep and rare friendship ; but even more is due to the dumb, half-conscious, still more sacred needs of the human spirit, in an age when things of the greatest worth are least valued and human life tends to be smothered by trifles or worse. Powerful minds are not so very rare among men ; tender hearts are even less rare among women ; religious spirits may still be found here and there, even in an epoch when genuine religiousness for the most part shrinks out of sight. But the actual luminous union in one man of the powerful mind, the tender heart, and the deeply religious spirit, is a fact too preciously helpful, for many who need to know the possibility of such a fact in these modern days, to permit me now to bury those letters any longer in a private drawer. The time has come to let this light shine wherever it may be needed, without fear that it will not be gratefully welcomed and profoundly reverenced, at least by a noble few.
There is very little, almost nothing, in fact, to relate of that quiet life, for nearly a quarter of a century, in the Dennis street home. The distance between Roxbury and Cambridge was not great, but, practically increased by in- convenient transportation and my own close engagements, great enough to prevent very frequent visits, especially during the seventies. Later, as time went on and left deepening marks on these friends of my early days, I
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