[Address, at the Memorial Meeting, in the House of Representatives, January 16, 1879.]
No page of human history is so instructive and significant as the record of those early influences which develop the character and direct the lives of eminent men. To every man of great original power, there comes in early youth, a moment of sudden discovery--of self recognition--when his own nature is revealed to himself, when he catches, for the first time, a strain of that immortal song to which his own spirit answers, and which becomes thenceforth and forever the inspiration of his life--
More than a hundred years ago, in Strasbourg, on the Rhine, in obedience to the commands of his father, a German lad was reluctantly studying the mysteries of the civil law, but feeding his spirit as best he could upon the formal and artificial poetry of his native land, when a page of William Shakespeare met his eye, and changed the whole current of his life. Abandoning the law, he created and crowned with an immortal name the grandest epoch of German literature.
At the first touch of Shakespeare's genius, I made the glad confession that something inspiring hovered above me.... The first page of his that I read made me his for life; and when I had finished a single play, I stood like one born blind, on whom a miraculous hand bestows sight in a moment. I saw, I felt, in the most vivid manner that my existence was infinitely expanded.
This Old World experience of Goethe's was strikingly reproduced, though under different conditions and with different results, in the early life of Joseph Henry. You have just heard the incident worthily recounted; but let us linger over it a moment. An orphan boy of sixteen, of tough Scotch fibre, laboring for his own support at the handicraft of the jeweler, unconscious of his great power, delighted with romance and the drama, dreaming of a possible career on the stage, his attention was suddenly arrested by a single page of an humble book of science which chanced to fall into his hands. It was not the flash of a poetic vision which aroused him. It was the voice of great Nature calling her child. With quick recognition and glad reverence his spirit responded; and from that moment to the end of his long and honored life, Joseph Henry was the devoted student of science, the faithful interpreter of nature.