Excerpt from Life of James Hamilton A trap to catch a sunbeam, - the playful title of a fiction, strangely presents itself here as the fittest phrase to express the aim, sober, grave, and tender, of this real and recent history. Great and good lives, - lives that are at once manly and godly, where the affections that spring from the earth are imbued with the holiness that distils from heaven, - are like rays of sunlight which gladden the world While they shine, but leave it dark and chilly when they depart. O for an art in the moral sphere, equiva lent to that of the photographer in the material, whereby we might seize, and fix, and perpetuate those rarer rays which stream through the mass of human history like veins of felspar in a quarry! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.