Part 16

There, where he had won his first fame in youth at the Lovejoy meeting, where he had stirred the whole land by his eloquence in the cause of the oppressed, it was fitting he should sleep at last.

The Irish National League of Boston sent a mound of flowers, three feet by four, with the word "Humanity" in the centre, in violets on a bed of carnations. The Irish-American Societies of Boston sent a harp four feet high of ivy leaves and japonicas, with the word "Ireland" in the centre. One of the harp strings was broken. Others sent a sheaf of ripened wheat, a crown of ivy and roses, and a wreath of laurel.

From one o'clock till four, thousands passed the form of their beloved dead; rich and poor, Irish and American, black and white, children and adults. One old colored woman, with tears flowing down her cheeks, said, "Our Wendell Philips has gone." Another said, "He was de bes' fren' we ever hed. We owes him a heap!"

Frederick Douglass looked on in sorrow. "I wanted to see this throng," he said, "and to see the hold that this man had upon the community. It is a wonderful tribute."

Thousands were unable to enter Faneuil Hall, and filled every available inch of space in the street, and windows and balconies of buildings. A vast crowd followed up State Street to Washington, up School to Tremont, to the old Granary burying-ground, where the body was laid in the family vault.

Mrs. Phillips died Saturday, April 24, 1886, two years after her husband. She had been closely confined to her home for the greater part of fifty years. "She lay as if asleep," says Francis J. Garrison, "with all the purity and guilelessness of her youthful face ripened into maturity. It seemed transfiguration."

The body of Wendell Phillips was carried with that of his wife to Milton, a beautiful suburb where they had often spent their summers; and both were buried in the same grave, side by side, in a lot which he had purchased a year or two before his death. A noble pine-tree stands near the spot. On a plain slab at the head of the grave are the words, "Ann and Wendell Phillips."

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

"The most brilliant and fertile pulpit-genius of the nineteenth century, and the most widely influential American of his time," says John Henry Barrows in his masterly life of Henry Ward Beecher. "To the sensitive heart of a woman, he added a lion-like courage, and a Miltonic loftiness of spirit. To the more than royal imagination of Jeremy Taylor, he added a zeal as warm as Whitefield's. In him the wit of Sydney Smith was combined with the common-sense of John Bunyan.

"In the annals of oratory his place is near that of Demosthenes. Among reformers he need fear no comparison with Wendell Phillips, John Bright, Mazzini, or Charles Sumner. In moral genius for statesmanship he was the brother of Abraham Lincoln; and, in the annals of the pulpit, he can only be mentioned with the greatest names,--Chrysostom, Bernard, Luther, Wesley, Chalmers, Spurgeon."

Dr. Mark Hopkins, in Edward W. Bok's "Memorial Volume," said of Henry Ward Beecher's forty years in Plymouth pulpit, "No such instance of prolonged, steady power at one point, in connection with other labors so extended and diversified, and magnificent in their results, has ever been known."

Dr. Thomas Armitage of the Fifth-avenue Baptist Church, New York, his life-long friend, gave Beecher "the first place among the preachers of the world to-day." Dr. Robert Collyer said, "To my mind, he was the greatest preacher on this planet.... Men will be his debtors for ages to come."

June 24, 1891, the statue of this great American leader, by John Quincy Adams Ward, was unveiled in front of Brooklyn City Hall. Three hundred children from Plymouth Church Sunday-school sang his favorite hymn,--

"Love divine, all love excelling,"

accompanied by the band of the Thirteenth Regiment.

Henry Ward Beecher, the son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote, was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813. The father was an eloquent, fearless, great-hearted man, the son and grandson of a sturdy blacksmith; the mother a refined, dignified, intellectual, beautiful, and superior woman. Her family connections were of the best in New England. Her ancestor, James Foote, an English officer, aided Charles II. of England to hide himself in the Royal Oak which grew in a field of clover, and for this was knighted; the family coat-of-arms bearing an oak for its crest with a clover-leaf in its quarterings.

Roxana, the granddaughter of General Ward of Revolutionary fame, was remarkably well educated for the times. She was versed in literature and history, which she studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff,--no wonder that her great son was an omniverous reader,--she wrote and spoke the French language fluently, drew with the pencil, and painted with the brush on ivory, sang and played on the guitar, and was an expert with her needle.

After her marriage with Mr. Beecher, she opened a school for girls in their parish at East Hampton, Long Island, to eke out a living on their four hundred dollars salary. From here they were called in 1810, eleven years after their marriage, to the hilly, lonely town of Litchfield, Conn., bringing their six little children with them.

Henry Ward was the ninth child, the eighth then living.

So many cares and privations broke down the beautiful mother, who died when Henry was three years old.

A friend of the family writes: "She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness prayed for life. She dedicated her sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that her children might be trained up for God....

"She attempted to speak to her children; but she was extremely exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done or could do, and that they must trust him."

After Lyman Beecher had prayed, "she fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a moving scene to see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother."

"They told us," says Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine's window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered, 'Why, I am going to heaven to find ma!'"

The benign influence of this lovely mother was never forgotten by Henry Ward Beecher. He said: "I have only such a remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago, faint, evanescent, and yet, caught by imagination and fed by that which I have heard of her, and by what my father's thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember.... Do you know why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her....

"She has been part and parcel of my upper life--a star whose parallax I could not take, but nevertheless, shining from afar, she has been the light that lit me easier into the thought of the invisible and the presence of the Divine."

Again her distinguished son wrote: "There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God."

When Henry Ward was eighteen, he found some letters of his mother to his father. He wrote in his diary: "O my mother! I could not help kissing the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that her hand had rested upon it while writing it. The hand of my mother! She had formed every letter which I saw. _She_ had _looked_ upon that paper which I now looked upon. She had folded it. She had sent it."

The Rev. Lyman Beecher said of her, "I never heard a murmur, ... I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it."

Henry Ward repeats this incident told him by his father: "One day, being much annoyed by some hogs that kept getting into his garden, he seized his gun and rushed to the door. My mother anxiously followed, and cried, 'O father, don't shoot the poor things!' He flashed back at her, 'Woman, go into the house!' and when he was telling me of it years afterwards he said: 'Without a word or look she turned, quietly, majestically, and went in--but she didn't get in before I did. I threw my arms around her in an agony of self-reproach, and cried "Forgive me, oh, forgive me!" She uttered no word, but she looked at me like a queen--and smiled--and kissed my face; my passion was gone, and my offence forgiven.' Up to the last of his life he never spoke of her but with intensest admiration and loving remembrance."

About a year after Roxana's death, Dr. Lyman Beecher found an estimable woman willing to be a mother to the eight motherless children, and to take summer boarders to help support the family, whose income was eight hundred dollars a year. She must have been a woman of great self-sacrifice.

Young Henry thought her saintly, but cold. "Although I was longing to love somebody," he writes, "she did not call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who was very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her.... I knew that about twilight she prayed; and I had a great shrinking from going past her door at the time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had set her affections on things above, and not on things beneath."

At four years of age Henry went to Ma'am Kilbourn's school, where he repeated his letters twice a day, and later to the district school, for which he had in those days no affection. "In winter," he says, "we were squeezed into the recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent to school to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys. We were read and spelt twice a day, unless something happened to prevent, which _did_ happen about every other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still.

"And a time we always had of it. Our shoes always would be scraping on the floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being educated. All our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our breasts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere else; and then with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of stillness, he would cry, 'Silence in that corner!' ...

"Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great iron box stove, red-hot." Those of us who have attended district schools in New England will recognize the truthfulness of the picture.

Henry longed for birds and flowers and books, as indeed he did all through college, and was ever a deeper student of nature than of books. And yet in after years he was glad for some of these school experiences. "I am thankful," he says, "that I learned to hem towels--as I did. I know how to knit suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about working in wood-sawing, chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that sort. I was brought up to put my hand to anything; so that when I went West, and was travelling on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road where there was an abandoned blacksmith's shop, I could go in and start the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What man has done man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up boys so that they shall think they can do anything. I could do anything."

The lad was sensitive to praise or blame, and extremely diffident. "To walk into a room where 'company' was assembled, and to do it erect and naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly.... Our backbone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known something of pain in after years, but few pangs have been more acute than some sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years."

Mr. Beecher felt all through his life that he owed much to a colored man, Charles Smith, who worked on his father's farm when he was a boy. "He used to lie upon his humble bed," says Mr. Beecher, "(I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room.... I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God.... He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father's family."

Henry was taken to Bethlehem, seven miles from Litchfield, to the school of the Rev. Mr. Langdon; but he seems here also to have loved the woods and flowers so much better than books, that he was finally sent to Hartford to the care of his sister Catherine, who taught a school for young ladies. Though a favorite on account of his sunny disposition, he proved a poor scholar, and was sent home at the end of six months. When the boy was thirteen, Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Boston, having been called to the pastorate of the Hanover-street Congregational Church at the North End.

Here he loved Christ Church chimes, listened to their music "with a pleasure and amazement," he says, "which I fear nothing will ever give me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous things in the New Jerusalem," and studied ships as he strolled along the docks, or lingered in Charlestown Navy Yard.

At the latter place he stole a six-pound shot, and not knowing how to get it home unobserved, carried it rolled in a handkerchief on the top of his head under his hat. With the greatest difficulty he brought it home, and then did not know what to do with it, not daring to show it, nor tell where he got it.

"But after all," he says, "that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole; and it gave me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has made my whole life happier."

The boy who had so loved the country among the hills of Connecticut, became gloomy and restless shut in by the treeless city. His father gave him the lives of Nelson and Captain Cook to read, and the lad resolved to go to sea. He could not bring himself to run away without telling his father, which he did. With rare tact Dr. Beecher replied that Henry would not wish to be an ordinary sailor.

"No," said the boy. "I want to be a midshipman, and after that a commodore."

"I see," said the father; "and in order for that you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation.... I will send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and there you'll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment."

At fourteen the lad entered Mount Pleasant Institute, the father hoping and praying that his boy "would be in the ministry yet."

With Lord Nelson and other great commanders in mind, he determined to master his studies and be somebody. Hard mathematics became easier, and he liked the drill in elocution. He enjoyed sport among the boys, and the semi-military methods of the school, but best of all he liked spending his play-hours in caring for beds of pansies and asters.

During a revival at Mount Pleasant, Henry was much moved, and wrote to his father, who advised his coming home to join the church. He did so, though he felt afterwards that the change in his life was not as thorough as he could have wished. However, it obliterated the desire of being a sailor, and turned his thoughts toward the ministry.

When he was seventeen, in 1830, he entered Amherst College. The great beauty of the scenery always had for him an especial charm. "I used to look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the blue mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and my eyes filled with tears."

In college he was fond of athletic sports, ready in wit, beginning to show his eloquence in debate, an ardent temperance advocate, a lover of rhetoric, botany, and geology, and a warm friend to his classmates. He cared little for the classics; but he read much, especially the old English authors, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others.

Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock, who was at Amherst with young Beecher, says, "He was by all odds the best debater of his college generation. I should be glad to know how he acquired his mastery of the English language.... The four books which probably helped him most were the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"

"He was," said Dr. John Haven, a classmate, "a great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when he graduated."

He necessarily used the greatest economy in college, his board costing him but one dollar and fifty cents a week, a mile from college grounds; and when vacation came he walked more than a hundred miles to Boston, because he had no money to pay the stage-coach fare.

Charles Beecher, the youngest of Roxana's children, was in college with his brother Henry. Dr. Beecher became so straitened in money matters that it seemed probable that the sons must leave college. He and his wife talked the matter over till finally he said, "Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am sure he always will." The mother lay awake after she had gone to bed, and cried over it; evidently she was not as cold at heart as the young Henry Ward thought.

The next morning was the Sabbath. The door-bell rang, and a one hundred dollar bill was handed in from Mr. Homes, as a thank-offering for the conversion of one of his children. The way was now opened for the boys to continue their college course.

After Henry had been at Amherst less than a year, in the spring vacation of 1831, he and another student walked fifty miles to the home of a classmate, and there fell in love with the sister of the latter, Eunice White Bullard, daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard of West Sutton, Mass.

"After our outside work was done," writes Mrs. Beecher, years later, "mother and I took knitting and sewing and sat down with them. I was going to wind a skein of sewing-silk (that was before spools were common), and, as was my custom, put it over the back of a chair. More gallant and thoughtful, _apparently_, than his older companions, this young gentleman insisted upon holding it for me to wind. For some reason--_perfectly unaccountable_, if one judged only by his quiet, innocent face, without watching the eyes and mouth--that skein became as intricately tangled as if tied by Macbeth's witches.

"'A badly tangled skein is it not?' said he, when I had lost half my evening in getting it wound.

"'Rather more troublesome, I imagine, than if I had kept it on the chair,' I replied. 'It was a good trial of patience, anyhow,' was his response to the laugh that followed."

The students remained for several days, and had a merry time. One day, after some pies had been taken out of the old-fashioned brick oven, a few ashes falling upon one, the mother asked Eunice to get them off. Henry offered to help, and respectfully taking the pie from her hands carried it into the garden, where he and his two other college friends ate it up. "There, we have cleared the plate nicely," said Henry Ward, as he handed it back to the mother.

Dr. Bullard said of young Beecher, "He's smart. If he lives, he'll make his mark in the world."

The next winter, January, 1832, Henry Ward taught school near the town where Eunice was teaching. He asked, "If she would go to the West with him as a missionary?" and was referred to her parents. Mrs. Bullard was grieved; but Dr. Bullard was angry, and said, "Why, you are a couple of babies. You don't know your own minds yet, and won't for some years to come." Young Beecher was a little over eighteen, and Miss Bullard ten months older.

About this time Henry earned five dollars for giving a temperance lecture, using the money to buy for his future wife the unusual love-gift of Baxter's "Saints' Rest."

Soon after, he walked to Brattleborough, Vt., fifty miles each way, gave a lecture, for which he received ten dollars, and with a part of the money bought an engagement-ring for Miss Bullard, which was also her wedding-ring, and with the rest the works of Edmund Burke.

This money gave him great satisfaction. "Oh, that bill!" he says. "How it warmed me and invigorated me! I looked at it before going to sleep; I examined my pocket the next morning, to be sure that I had not dreamed it. How I pitied the _poor_ students, who had not, I well knew, ten dollars in _their_ pockets. Still, I tried to keep down pride in its offensive forms. I would not be lifted up."

After he had bought the books, he says, "I was a man that owned a library! I became conservative and frugal. Before, I had spent at least a dollar and a half a year for knickknacks; but, after I had founded a library, I reformed all such wastes, and every penny I could raise or save I compelled to transform itself into books!" When he graduated, he owned about fifty volumes.

Dr. Lyman Beecher having left Boston to become the President of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Henry and Charles went thither to study theology. The three years spent there were full of pathetic, and sometimes comic, incidents. In this, at that time far West, the fences were poor, and cattle were apt to stray at will over flower-beds and across the gardens. One day Henry found a strange cow lying down on the barn floor. He quickly drove her out, chased her down the street, and, hot and tired, came to the house and threw himself on the sofa.

"There, I guess I have taught one old cow to know where she belongs," he remarked to his father.

"What do you mean?" said the doctor, growing excited. "Well, you have done it. I have just bought that cow, and had to wade the Ohio River twice to get her home; and, after I have got her safely into the barn, you have turned her out. You have done it, and no mistake." And the cow was vigorously hunted up.

During all these years affectionate letters were sent to Eunice Bullard. "What a noble creation E---- is," young Beecher writes in his journal. "I could have looked through ten thousand and never found one so every way suited to me. How dearly do I love her!"