MR. MORGAN’S PERSONALITY
AS VIEWED BY HIS FRIENDS
BY JOSEPH B. GILDER
IT was in the panic days of 1907—late October. The Secretary of the Treasury had hurried from Washington to New York, and was spending his days (long days they were, too) at the Sub-Treasury and his evenings at the Manhattan Hotel, where all who needed to could see him. Meanwhile the bankers conferred daily at Mr. Morgan’s office, across the street from the Sub-Treasury, and nightly at his library in Thirty-sixth Street. While they put their heads together and worked out details, their host spent most of his time in his private room in the library building, not infrequently playing solitaire. But he was always within reach when counsel was needed; and his word was law.
To allay popular fears, it was decided to issue a public statement, and the library conferees prepared one and took it up to show to Secretary Cortelyou at his hotel. Mr. Morgan went with them. He had not yet seen the statement, and when one of the party started to read it aloud, he stopped him at the first sentence. “Is that correct?” he asked. “It will be by the time the statement is published,” was the reply. “No, gentlemen, that won’t do. If it isn’t so now, we can’t say it. We’ve got to state the facts exactly as they are. The public must have the truth and nothing but the truth.” And the statement was modified accordingly.
Mr. Morgan had had just half a century’s preparation for doing the public the immense service he rendered it in “composing” the panic of 1907; for he had been in the banking business since 1857—another panic year. Ability, experience, character, reputation, and financial resources were his, and had put him in a position to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. He had done wonders to preserve the national credit before the year 1907, but it had never fallen to his lot to do anything quite so spectacular (though unintentionally so) as he did at this time. What he did, no one else, however capable, could have done, or, at least, have done so well. It needed just the combination of attributes and qualities he possessed to give the needed authority to his acts.
His whole character was summed up in the brief sentences addressed to his fellow bankers in Mr. Cortelyou’s presence. Always his words were few; but always they were pregnant and unequivocal. What he said he meant, and what he meant he said.
It is no truer that Wall Street—“the Street” par excellence—is the financial center of the Western world than that Mr. Morgan was the dominant personality therein. He himself was not the Street, for that term includes the Stock Exchange, a large part of the activities of which are purely speculative; and at no time in his life was Mr. Morgan a speculator. Wall Street signifies, and will increasingly signify, as time goes on, the abiding-place of bankers rather than of brokers; and it was in the banking world that Mr. Morgan reigned supreme.
The transactions in which he was the chief factor ran all the way up to the more than $1,400,000,000 capital of the United States Steel Corporation. The total amount involved in his organizations and reorganizations of railways, industrial concerns, and public utilities, and his flotations of American and English government bonds, was thousands of millions of dollars. Never has one man exercised such control over the accumulated wealth and undeveloped resources of a great country. The power appeared to be despotic, but if it really was so, the despotism was so tempered by probity and a high sense of responsibility as to lose all the terrors the term usually connotes.
An old friend, a banker in close touch with many of Mr. Morgan’s most important operations, was asked the secret of his success. “There was no secret about it,” said he. “I think his chief asset was integrity. Of course, being honest doesn’t make a man rich. He must have—as Mr. Morgan had—immense energy and ability. But a man in the banking business can’t make a great success with these qualities alone. At the ‘Money Trust’ inquiry it was shown that the Morgan house had more than a hundred million dollars on deposit; and this was by no means high-water mark. Probably these deposits have been twice as great, at times. Now, no matter how brilliant a man is, people don’t put more than two hundred million dollars in his hands unless they know him to be honest to the core, as Mr. Morgan was.” When I quoted this to a clergyman, he said: “That is the business man’s point of view.” “So much the better for business,” I replied. The president of a great commercial bank made this confirmatory comment: “Mr. Morgan’s power lay in his keen sense of trusteeship.”
An intimate friend of Mr. Morgan’s, speaking of the financier’s mental attributes, remarked that his mind never appeared to work deliberately, logically, but to attain its results by intuition, as it were; in other words, he was a man of genius. What the business man usually lacks is imagination; but imagination was perhaps the largest element in Mr. Morgan’s mind. It was this that made his actions great. It was his constructive imagination that made it possible for Mr. Claflin, President of the New York Chamber of Commerce and himself a distinguished man of affairs, to say: “Like the founders of this nation, Mr. Morgan had prophetic vision; like them, he was an organizer of scattered possibilities and a builder of mighty structures such as no man had built before.” It was because of his imaginative force that Senator Root called him “the greatest master of commerce of the world”; and that Mr. Choate said that “only once in a generation is such a mind born in such a body.” And it was this that prompted our English kin to liken him to Cecil Rhodes, to Bismarck, and to Napoleon.
Mr. Morgan’s great gift to Harvard University was made in a way that illustrates his habitual promptness of decision. He and Mr. Rockefeller were among those who were asked to contribute to the habilitation of the Medical School. The latter caused a thorough investigation to be made, which lasted for six months. At the end of that time he received a favorable report and was advised to give $500,000. He bettered the advice, however, by giving a round million. Mr. Morgan’s course was equally characteristic. When the needs of the school were explained to him, he made an appointment to see two or three of the professors at his office. Entering from his private room with his watch in his hand, he said: “I am pressed for time and can give you but a moment. Have you any plans to show me?” The plans were produced and unrolled; and moving his finger quickly from point to point, “I will build that,” he said, “and that—and that—and that. Good morning, gentlemen.” The cost was over a million dollars. Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller had reached exactly the same conclusion as to the merits of the case and the amount of his contribution, but by what different methods!
Mr. Morgan’s activities and achievements in the financial field divide themselves into three main groups: the reorganizing of bankrupt railways, or railways threatened with bankruptcy; the forming of great industrial organizations, and the floating of corporate or government bonds. His chief performance in the last-mentioned line was the flotation of United States Government bonds in the year 1895, when, incidentally, Messrs. Morgan and Belmont arranged with President Cleveland and his Secretary of the Treasury further to protect the national credit by putting a stop to the menacing outflow of American gold to Europe.
At the age of seventy, the veteran financier was called upon to render another great service to the country by organizing and directing the forces that put an end to the panic of 1907, as noted at the beginning of this article. His efforts at this trying time won the gratitude and applause of all right-thinking men. Yet, five years thereafter, in the spectacular search for a bogy popularly styled the “Money Trust,” he was put upon the rack by a congressional committee and subjected to a prolonged quizzing. To a man so proud, so shy and so sensitive, the ordeal was a dreaded one, but he had made no attempt to evade it. In the end, it afforded him an opportunity of bearing emphatic witness that personal integrity is the basis of all credit. The tonic effect of this testimony was felt from one end of the land to the other, and, had the witness been a younger man, his gratification would have much more than outweighed the strain upon his nervous system. As it was, his friends do not attribute to this ordeal his collapse a few weeks later, while on his way to the scene of the excavations in Egypt which the Metropolitan Museum of Art was conducting at his expense.
Nothing has been said oftener of Mr. Morgan than that he was “a ‘bull’ on America.” One of his old friends disclosed, the other day, the origin of this “bullishness.” As is well known, Mr. Morgan was an optimist. His father’s temperament was the same, and the older man impressed upon his son—when he was returning to America more than half a century ago, to go into business—his own belief in this country and his faith in its future. “Any man who is a ‘bear’ on America is bound to fail,” he said. Coming from the lips of his father, whom during his life the son leaned on and respected, and whose memory he revered and honored, these words made an indelible impression on the young man’s mind; the more indelible as they confirmed his personal feeling and conviction and, in later years, his experience. As it turned out, his confidence in the country’s future was a potent factor in its material prosperity.
Current report has it that once, when Mr. Morgan invited into his firm a young man who had made a name for himself, he said, “I want you to come down here and ‘do things.’” Less well known—though as well worth preserving—is his word to another bright young man, in similar circumstances. Surprised no less than gratified at the invitation, the fortunate one exclaimed, “But what can I do for J. P. Morgan and Company?” “I don’t ask you to make money for us,” was the reply; “but we have a great many duties and responsibilities here, and I want you to come in and help us bear them.”
It is related that Mr. Morgan’s father once threatened to withdraw his power of attorney from the son, if the latter persisted in overworking. If the warning was given, it probably was heeded; but Mr. Morgan was always a great worker, though in his later years, at least, he realized the value of holidays, as is shown in the saying ascribed to him: “I can do a year’s work in nine months, but not in twelve.” Apropos is the legend that partnership in the Morgan house meant a short life, if not a merry one. Undoubtedly, all the members of the firm had their work cut out for them. It could not be otherwise in a house that stood at the top and meant to maintain its position. There was an immense amount of work to be done, and they were there to do it. But they were always men who liked to work; and the fact is that when a partner died or retired, it was at an age when death or retirement was not unnatural. There have been few exceptions to this rule. And one, at least, of Mr. Morgan’s former partners has survived his chief, though several years his senior.
Mr. Morgan’s own stalwart physique and capacity for work were an inheritance from his father, whose death, at seventy-seven, was due to an accident. Some of his indomitable energy must have come to him from his maternal grandfather and namesake, John Pierpont; for, when the Civil War began, that poet, patriot, preacher, and ardent reformer, after seventy-six strenuous years, had the pluck to enlist as a chaplain (though for a very brief service) and lived to be eighty-one years old.
It is recalled that at school Mr. Morgan was a writer of verse, but it does not appear whether this was due to the example of his grandfather, one of whose poems on the death of a child—“I Cannot Call Him Dead”—has gone into the anthologies.
An interesting incident relating to the poet is told me by a friend. During the Civil War, Father Pierpont (as he was called) was a clerk in the Treasury Department at Washington, and while there was often a visitor at the house of Paul H. Berkau, well remembered in Washington as president of the Schillerbund, a club for the study of German literature. The Berkaus were abolitionists, friends of Sumner and Julian, and other men of that faith, and this was a bond between them and their friend the poet. One day, when he came to see them, he found on the table a copy of his volume, “Airs of Palestine and Other Poems.” He took it up and wrote on the fly-leaf these lines:
“Shame! that my book should to my friend be sold
Rather than made a present of, or lent;
Sold, too, for paper, not so good as gold
By forty-eight or forty-nine per cent.
Jno. Pierpont.
Washington, D. C., 3 Dec., 1863.”
In 1902 one of the owner’s family, coming into possession of this volume, presented it to Mr. Morgan with this inscription:
This volume, formerly the property of my uncle, Mr. Paul H. Berkau, to whom the poet wrote the inscription, is respectfully presented by me to Mr. John Pierpont Morgan, who has done so much to keep our “paper” as “good as gold.”
Mr. Morgan received the volume with evident delight.
For many years it was Mr. Morgan’s custom to engage a furnished house in the city in which a general convention of the Episcopal Church was to be held (he himself being always a lay delegate from New York), and to entertain therein, as long as the convention lasted, a group of his particular friends in the episcopate. A private car conveyed these parties to their destination; and once, when the place of meeting was San Francisco, a special train was engaged for the long journey. Mr. Morgan’s guests on these occasions were usually Bishop Potter or (later) Bishop Greer of New York, Bishop Doane of Albany, the Bishops of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and the wives or other members of the families of these gentlemen. The present bishop of New York relates that once, when some one raised the question of the familiarity of the members of the party with the services of the church, it proved that their host was better versed in the collects, the hymns, and the Shorter Catechism than any of his clerical guests. This only confirms other anecdotes illustrating the extraordinary retentiveness of his memory; for, while he was a habitual church-goer, never missing a Sunday morning service if he was within reach of a church, he could hardly have attended as many services, in the course of his life, as the youngest of the bishops present. His similar hospitality and constant attention to the Archbishop of Canterbury, primate of the Church of England, during that prelate’s visit to America a few years ago, caused a wit to speak of His Grace as “Pierpontifex Maximus.”
His devotion to the interests of the church was of long standing. It showed itself, of course, at Highland Falls, on the Hudson, the village nearest his summer home; and more conspicuously at St. George’s in Stuyvesant Square, New York City, where the simple, impressive service chosen by himself was read at his funeral on the fourteenth of April. To the activities of this church—a body less distinguished for the wealth and social prominence of its members than for its work among the poor—he was for many years a liberal subscriber. The spacious, well-equipped parish-house commemorated his father-in-law, Mr. Charles E. Tracy, a former vestryman. And at a time when there was special need of larger revenues, he made it known that, for a considerable period, he would duplicate every contribution made by other parishioners. At the time of his death, he was senior warden of St. George’s, and he never had missed a meeting of the vestry when he was in New York.
His interest in denominational affairs manifested itself in other directions. To the building fund of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral in Albany he gave handsomely. When subscriptions were first asked for the building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York, he put his name down for half a million dollars; and to this sum he afterward added $100,000. At a meeting of a committee appointed to raise money for a synod house, when he learned that $50,000 had been subscribed but that $250,000 more was needed, he made himself responsible for the whole amount, requesting that the earlier subscribers be relieved of their obligations. Finding, however, that Mr. Bayard Cutting wished to participate on equal terms in this gift to the General Convention, he contented himself with assuming one half the entire burden—which in its entirety proved to be $350,000 instead of the estimated $300,000. Thus his gifts in connection with the new cathedral amounted to nearly $900,000, and his friends in the church were not surprised that his will made no further provision for this great undertaking. Not only at home but abroad was he the cheerful giver the Lord is said to love, as witness the installation of electricity in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, at a cost approximating $200,000.
The benevolent institution that ranked next to the church in Mr. Morgan’s regard was the Lying-In Hospital, near St. George’s Church, in Stuyvesant Square. Having bought the house and grounds of the late Mr. Hamilton Fish, skirting Second Avenue from Seventeenth to Eighteenth Street, and some adjoining houses, he sent Dr. James W. Markoe abroad to study the hospitals of Europe, and in due time authorized the preparation of plans for a model building to cost about $750,000. By the time these plans had been drawn and specifications had been worked out, the price of materials had greatly increased, and the estimated cost proved to be about half a million more than was expected. Instead of abandoning the project, or waiting for prices to decline, or demanding a drastic revision of the plans, Mr. Morgan’s word was, “Go ahead—and cut out nothing.” When the hospital was built and thoroughly equipped, Mr. Morgan made up for the city’s inadequate annual contribution to this great charity by giving $100,000 a year toward its maintenance.
Harvard University, especially the Medical School; the Art Museum at Hartford, founded in memory of his father, Junius Spencer Morgan of London; the New York Trade School, which he handsomely endowed; the American Academy in Rome, and the Loomis Sanatorium were the other chief beneficiaries of his discriminating bounty. But the institutions, causes, and individuals (many of the latter personally unknown to him) that were indebted to Mr. Morgan for substantial aid, at one time or another, were innumerable as the autumnal leaves of Vallombrosa. Many of his benefactions were not publicly recorded, and if he recollected them himself, it was only because his memory was incapable of relaxing its grasp on anything, large or small, that had once entered it. As the London “Spectator” said, never was there a millionaire so set upon effacing his name from his deeds of beneficence.
Mr. Morgan’s connection with the Metropolitan Museum of Art dated from 1871, when the institution was organized. For twenty-five years he was one of the trustees, and since 1904 he had been president. He took an intense interest in its upbuilding, contributing thereto not only of his wealth but of his time and affection. So conspicuous was his identification with the art museum that it obscured his relations with the American Museum of Natural History, on the other side of Central Park. Yet these were equally close and well-nigh as important, involving forty years’ activity as a trustee and long service, first as treasurer and again as vice-president. Here, too, his gifts were lavish. His love of beauty showed itself in the presentation to the museum of large and choice collections of minerals and precious stones; but these were only a small part of his contributions, which included money for endowment, maintenance and research, as well as innumerable objects for exhibition.
Owing largely to modern facilities for travel and communication, the personality of the American Mæcenas was probably better known in foreign countries than that of any private citizen of the past. He was a very familiar figure in England, where he succeeded years ago to the headship of his father’s firm, as well as to the ownership and yearly occupancy of his father’s town house and country-seat; where most of his collections were kept for many years; and where his gift to St. Paul’s Cathedral showed his lively interest in the Church of England and in the City of London. He was equally well known in France, where he was the head of a banking-house and a benefactor of his favorite health resort, Aix-les-Bains; in Germany, where his presentation of an important letter of Luther’s to the Imperial Government was heartily appreciated; in Italy, where he endeared himself to Pope and people by the restoration of the cope of Ascoli, and where his last hours were passed; and finally in Egypt, the antiquities as well as the climate of which had an attraction for him that grew constantly stronger. Moreover, his fame as a collector made him an object of intense, if not altruistic, interest in the various lands in which he sojourned.
Having achieved an international reputation as a maker of money for his clients and customers, as well as for himself, Mr. Morgan found no less pleasure, but rather more, in making a new and quite as wide a reputation as a spender. His collections were made en prince. He never haggled over a bargain, but took a thing on the seller’s terms or left it. When he declined a book, a manuscript, or an object of art at the owner’s price, he must have been aware that that price was exorbitant; for his purchases were made with an open hand, many of them at figures that somewhat discounted the appreciation in values when competition should have become even keener than it was when he entered the field. His activities as a buyer doubtless caused a general rise in the price of rarities—an inevitable result of the rather rapid making of a collection that has recently been insured for $23,000,000 and would probably fetch a much larger sum if disposed of under favorable conditions. In estimating the commercial value of such a collection, it must be borne in mind that the number of masterpieces is virtually fixed, while the number of potential competitors for their possession continually increases.
When Mr. Morgan bought the house adjoining his father’s former home, No. 13 Princes Gate, London, joined the two, and filled the addition with things for which there had been no space before—having a room especially designed to hold the series of Fragonards; when he left in the National Gallery the Colonna Raphael, for which he had given a hundred thousand pounds or so; when he filled case after case in the South Kensington Museum with priceless treasures, he had no prevision that by far the greater part of his collections would be coming, before long, to New York. Their departure did not follow hard upon the passage of the law exempting from tariff charges works of art more than twenty years old. But when Mr. Morgan learned, last year, from Mr. Lloyd-George’s own lips, that if he should die while his collections remained in England, his estate would have to pay $300,000 or more on the Raphael alone, he promptly arranged to transfer his treasures to his own country, where the death duties are less onerous. And now that they are safely arrived, word comes, through his will, that in due time they may become permanently accessible to the American people. Already the literary treasures, safeguarded in the exquisite library building adjoining his house in Thirty-sixth Street, are accessible to accredited students and amateurs; hundreds of his art works—paintings, porcelains, carvings, tapestries, etc.—are on view in the Metropolitan Museum; and only the erection of a suitable building (presumably in the form of an addition to the museum itself) delays the revelation of the full extent of the rich and varied collections the acquisition of which gave so keen a zest to the financier’s later years.
Of Mr. Morgan’s many activities, he enjoyed none more keenly, and found none more beneficial, than yachting. As many days and hours as he could spare, he passed aboard his steam yacht, the Corsair, often spending the summer nights in New York Bay or on Long Island Sound, early in the week, and running up the Hudson, to his country home, for the week-end. Longer trips were made to Newport or Bar Harbor—with the New York Yacht Club, when its annual cruise was on; at other times with only his personal guests. From 1897 till 1899, he was the club’s commodore; and his hand went deep into his pocket to build the Columbia, which defended the America’s cup in the last of these years, and was used as a trial boat in 1901, when Reliance was the defender. The Corsair of 1891 (a 242-foot boat) was sold to the Government, as other yachts were, when we were at war with Spain, in 1898. As the Gloucester, under Captain Wainwright, she gave a very good account of herself at Santiago. That year the Sagamore served as flagship; but on the very day the Commodore sold the Corsair he had commissioned her designer, Mr. J. Beavor Webb, to build a boat sixty-two feet longer than the old one; and the next year the new Corsair was launched.
Mr. Morgan’s private signal was known in Europe as well as in home waters, though he never crossed the ocean on anything but a great liner, usually the flagship of the White Star Line. This line—the chief subsidiary of the International Mercantile Marine Company, one of his many organizations—was in a sense his pet; and the sinking of the Titanic, in whose construction he had taken the keenest interest, was probably a heavier blow to him than to any one to whom it did not bring personal bereavement.
Mr. Morgan’s great liking for collies is known to all lovers of dogs, and the Cragston kennels are decorated with many a first prize won at the Madison Square Garden and elsewhere. As a rule, the animals, young and old, are confined to their own quarters, well away from the house, and separated from the house grounds by the public road that runs along the bluff on the west shore of the Hudson at this point. Despite the comfort, not to say luxuriousness, of their surroundings indoors, they are always overjoyed to be let out; and one of their owner’s keenest pleasures was to see them released; to watch them dash, in a pack, to the gateway, turn sidewise in the air as they sprang through, then tear like mad down the road in the direction of Highland Falls and West Point, yelping as if possessed. After running a few hundred yards, they would turn as suddenly as they had started, and race back, passing the gate at full speed, and dashing another hundred rods or so, before turning again.
“Sefton Hero,” or some other great prize-winner, was likely to be seen about the house in the daytime; but to only one collie was granted the privilege of permanent occupancy. This was a dog that had been in the habit of running down the private road to meet his master on the arrival of the yacht, the private signal of which he had learned to recognize. One afternoon, in his zealous haste, he failed to see a railway train that arrived just as he reached the riverside. The cow-catcher struck him and tossed him many feet, but happily he landed on a bit of swampy ground with no bones broken. His devotion, with its almost fatal consequences, won him special privileges for the rest of his days.
Not long after the completion of Mr. Morgan’s greatest work as an organizer, he was the chief guest at a dinner of the Gridiron Club, in Washington—one of those functions where the newspaper “boys” have fun with the great ones of the earth. It was, of course, impossible to get him to talk; but leaving the room, late at night, his arm linked in that of his old friend Mr. George F. Baker, he exclaimed, “If only I were a speaker, how I should have liked to talk for an hour to-night, and tell them the story of the organization of the Steel Corporation!” He may have felt an equally strong impulse to unbosom himself on other occasions, but if so he repressed it.
An invincible shyness, which seemed hardly consistent with the man’s dominating forcefulness, made him as sedulous in avoiding publicity as many are in courting it. On certain occasions it was impossible for him to escape the spot-light; but when its rays fell full upon him his discomfort was obvious. Such an occasion was the dedication of the New Theatre, now the Century. As chairman, it was Mr. Morgan’s duty to receive the silver key of the building from the architect. For once he had to take the center of the stage in only too literal a sense. As he sat there throughout the addresses of Senator Root and Governor Hughes, alternately glancing at, and crumpling up, the scrap of paper on which his notes were written, it was an easy guess that the remotest corner of the attic would have been a preferable place of waiting; and when his turn came, and he had pronounced his two or three formal sentences, his relief was evident. Once, when he was called on for a speech, he said, “No, no, gentlemen; I have never made a speech in my life, and I’m not going to begin now.”
Now and then a business proposition of minor importance would be submitted for Mr. Morgan’s approval, which was usually given or withheld after apparently cursory consideration. If the matter came up again months afterward, and there was any difference of opinion as to its details, the recollection of the senior partner, who had given the thing five minutes’ attention, was invariably found to be more nearly correct than that of the juniors, who had had the handling of the business. Once in a way, Mr. Morgan might have occasion to borrow a small coin. If so, the next time he met the lender, no matter how many weeks had elapsed, he would recall the occurrence and repay the loan, as surely as if the amount were a quarter of a million instead of a quarter of a dollar. A table or a chair not in its accustomed place attracted his attention; a picture hanging slightly askew disturbed him. For ten or fifteen years before his death, it was his habit to play solitaire for a while before going to bed, and he arranged the cards with the utmost neatness and precision. For his mind was nothing if not orderly, and disorder in exterior objects disturbed it. When great affairs occupied it, there was no room for petty details; but in the absence of matters of moment, its craving for activity had to satisfy itself with whatever came to hand.
Mr. Morgan’s delicate sense of the fitness of things is illustrated by an incident related by the young lady who rebound some of the choicest books in his library. One of these is Geoffrey Tory’s “Book of Hours” (1525). Into the cover design Miss Lahey wove Tory’s name, as he himself was in the habit of doing; but Mr. Morgan would not allow her to reproduce the emblem of a broken jug which the old French artist had adopted as his sign-manual, using it on every page of his illuminations. Mr. Morgan’s feeling was that this device was too personal to the artist himself to be used on any work but that of his own hands.
The public was surprised at the fervent declaration of religious belief with which Mr. Morgan’s remarkable document began. It almost appeared that he regarded his faith as a thing so real, not to say tangible, as to be transmissible by legal process. Certainly it was fundamental in his own nature, and as potent a force as any that shaped his actions. In a noteworthy tribute in the “Outlook,” a former partner and most intimate friend, Mr. Robert Bacon, late Ambassador to France, sums up the matter in these few words: “He was a man of faith; not only religious faith, but faith in the universe, in humanity, in his country, in his associates, and in the highest standards of honor in both his public and his private life.”
A giant frame, an iron will,
A mind that sped as lightning speeds,
Cleaving a way for wits less keen—
A man whose words were deeds.
Simple, sincere, accessible
To all that sought; but woe betide
Him who before those piercing eyes
Faltered, evaded, lied!
And yet those eyes, so quick to blaze
And sear, were no less quick to bless;
For strength and courage, in great hearts,
Mate still with tenderness.
Honest, for honesty’s own sake—
Loyal, for so his soul was made—
With one swift glance he chose his ground,
And held it unafraid.
Keen to acquire, to spend, to give,
Ardent in all things, small in none,
He joyed and sorrowed, lived and loved
And toiled till his task was done.
J. B. G.
