What is true of Stratford-upon-Avon is equally true of Abbotsford, of the birth-place of Milton, Burns, Bunyan, Baxter, and other great minds, which have shone each like a sun or star in its sphere.  Now, what one word, recognised as legitimate in scientific terminology, would describe fully one of these disks of light cast by a human life upon a certain space of earth, not as a fugitive flash, but as a permanent illumination? Photograph would not do it, because its meaning is fixed and rigidly technical, as simple light-writing, or sun-writing.  The term is completely pre-occupied by this signification, and you cannot inject the human life element into it. Biography is universally limited to an operation in which the life is the subject, not the agent.  It is simply the writing out of a life’s history by some one with a common goose-quill or steel pen.  Still, the word biograph would be the best, of the same length, that we could form to describe one of these disks of light, if it were made the same verb active as photograph; or to mean that the life is the agent, as well as the subject,—­that it writes itself in light upon a certain locality, just as the sun graves a human face upon glass.  Let us then call the bright and quenchless planispheres, which such lives describe and fill around them, biographs, assuming that the script is in rays of light.  As differ the stars above in glory, so these differ in the qualities of their illumination.  The brightest of them, to mere human seeming, are those which shine with the sheer brilliancy of intellect and genius.  These chiefly halo the homes of “the grand old masters” of poetry, painting, eloquence, and martial glory.  These attract to their disks pilgrims the most numerous and enthusiastic.  But, as the nearest stars are brightest, not largest, so these biographs are brightest on their earth-side.  There are thousands of less sharp and spangling lustre to the eyes of the multitude, which shine with tenfold more brilliancy from their eternity-face.  These are they that halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank in the life of God’s love in perpetual streams, and distilled it like a luminous dew around them; men whose thoughts were not mere scintillations of genius, but living labors of beneficence, bearing the proof as well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the deeds of earth’s saints.  If the soul, after such long isolation, is to take again to its embrace so much of the old human corporeity it wore here below, does it transcend the prerogative of hope in the great resurrection to believe that these biographs of God’s loving children on earth shall be taken up whole into the same immortality as the bodies in which they worked His will among men?  Is the faith too fanciful or irreverent that believes, that the corridors and inner temples of Heaven’s Glory will be hung with these biographs of His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of His love