[18]
Address by Mr. Butterworth
After a very touching solo by Miss Clark, entitled ‘God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,’ Hezekiah Butterworth spoke words of eloquent eulogy. ‘A builder of men,’ he said, ‘has gone from among us. A man who lived for what he could do for others, whose one desire and ideal was that he might make an impression upon the young man of America and lift him to higher standards, has joined the choir invisible.’ Continuing, he said: ‘I am not going to speak of his forty or more books, or the work that he did on the St. Nicholas or the Wide Awake, but of him as an inspirer of young life,—of a man, himself inspired, who was the cause of inspiration in others.’ Mr. Butterworth told how William Lloyd Garrison had touched John G. Whittier, then a young man, on the shoulder, and said, ‘You are a poet,’ and how Whittier, in turn, said the same to Lucy Larcom in her early life, and the results which followed from the words of encouragement. N. Parker Willis and James T. Fields were others who inspired young writers. In the same way, he said, Mr. Brooks had words of encouragement for young authors, and helped them along the difficult pathway to success. Among the cases he cited without giving names wasone whose works have outsold nearly all others in the last ten or twenty years, and who had been told by Mr. Brooks what to do, and how to do it, in order to make his writings a success. Mr. Brooks told this man how to make the imperfect perfect, and so was produced one of the most popular books ( “Eben Holden,” presumably) of the present age. Men who build, men who have influence like Mr. Brooks, live on and on, and their influence continually increases. Mr. Brooks once said to me: “My desire is to write historical books that will make the past live again.”
