As the language he clothed with such power and might shall spread itself over the earth, and be spoken, too, by races born to another tongue, his life-rays will permeate the minds of countless myriads, and the more widely they diverge and the farther they reach, the brighter and warmer will be the glow and the flow of that disk of light that embosoms and illumines his birth-place in England.
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.