His most successful biography, his "Life of Charles H. Spurgeon," was written in a little more than two weeks. In fact, it was not written at all, it was dictated while on a lecturing trip. When Spurgeon died, a publisher telegraphed Dr. Conwell if he would write a biography of the great London preacher. Dr. Conwell was traveling at the time in the West, lecturing. He wired an affirmative, and sent for his private secretary. It was during the building of the College when great financial responsibilities were resting on him, and he was lecturing every night to raise money for the college building fund. His secretary accompanied him on the lecture trip. Dr. Conwell dictated the book on the train during the day, the secretary copied it from his notes at night while Dr. Conwell lectured. At the end of two weeks the book of six hundred pages was nearly completed. It had a sale of 125,000 copies in four months. And all the royalties were given to a struggling mission of Grace Baptist Church.
[Illustration: TEMPLE COLLEGE]
His biography of Elaine was written almost as rapidly. In a few hours after Blaine was nominated as candidate of the Republican party for the presidency. Dr. and Mrs. Conwell boarded a train and started for Augusta, Maine. In three weeks the book was completed.
He has worked at times from four o'clock in the morning until twelve at night when work pressed and time was short.
His life of Bayard Taylor was also written quickly. He had traveled with Taylor through Europe and long been an intimate friend, so that he was particularly well fitted for the work. The book was begun after Taylor's death, December 19, 1878, in Germany, and completed before the body arrived in America. Five thousand copies were sold before the funeral.
Dr. Conwell presided at the memorial service held in Tremont Temple, Boston. Many years after, in a sermon preached at The Temple, he thus described the occasion:
"When Bayard Taylor, the traveler and poet, died, great sorrow was felt and exhibited by the people of this nation. I remember well the sadness which was noticed in the city of Boston. The spontaneous desire to give some expression to the respect in which Hr. Taylor's name was held, pressed the literary people of Boston, both writers and readers, forward to a public memorial in the great hall of Tremont Temple. As a friend of Mr. Taylor's I was called upon to preside at that memorial gathering. That audience of the scholarly classes was a wonderful tribute to a remarkable man, and one for which. I feel still a keen sense of gratitude. I remember asking Mr. Longfellow to write a poem, and to read it, and standing on the broad step at his front door, in Cambridge, he replied to my suggestion with the sweet expression: 'The universal sorrow is almost too sacred to touch with a pen.'
"But when the evening came, although Professor Longfellow was too ill to be present, his poem was there. The great hall was crowded with the most cultivated people of Boston. On the platform sat many of the poets, orators and philosophers, who have since passed into the Beyond. When, after several speeches had been made, I arose to introduce Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the pressure of the crowd was too great for me to reach my chair again, and I took for a time the seat which Dr. Holmes had just left, and next to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Never were words of poet listened to with a silence more respectfully profound than were the words of Professor Longfellow's poem as they were so touchingly and beautifully read by Dr. Holmes:
"'Dead he lay among his books,
The peace of God was in his looks!
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