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[22] cost him his life. it was a sublime expression of the hidden beauty of his real character and soul. day by day he had been seeking for years to gain that freedom which is the reward of obedience to the highest laws of life, and little by little he had been fashioning a character unfettered and untrammelled by human weaknesses and prejudices, and strong in the noblest qualities of heart and mind. galahad cried, “if i lose myself, i save myself!” in the same spirit, and with the same insight into truth, harper sought to keep unbroken the vision of immortality which was his, to be faithful to an ideal of duty, which, by a seeming loss, he has made incarnate for all time.
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[23] will bring courage and inspiration to many, and in the knowledge that there is something of inestimable worth in a recorded experience which reveals the endeavour of a human soul to know and attain the highest, and to realize its divine capacities amid the complexities of every-day life.
