The quality of a man’s love will determine the nature of his deeds; occasion may present the opportunity, but character alone will record the experience. To a life given over to the pursuit of the beautiful and true, the immortal hour only comes when conduct at last rises to the level of aim, and the ideal finds its fulfilment in the realm of the actual. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Few lives have been more earnest or constant in the pursuit of an ultimate perfection than was Henry Albert Harper’s; few have sought more conscientiously than he to live out existence under the guidance of lofty aspirations, and in the light of pure ideals. There was nothing exceptional, save the opportunity, in the chivalrous act which By what path the heroic was attained in Harper’s life may be traced from the pages of a diary, in which at intervals he recorded his thoughts, and from the words he has left in letters to his friends. Fragmentary as these are, an attempt has been made in the following pages to weave from them the story of his inner life, in the belief that its beauty |