Part 6

Mr. Sewall prayed with the workmen before they began to take down the house. It is curious to note the remarkable faith in direct answer to prayer in those days. President Dwight lays emphasis upon the fact, and gives the following instance in the life of Mr. Prince as evidence: "It was the destruction of the French fleet, under Duke D'Anville, in 1746. Forty ships of war, destined for the destruction of New England, were fitted out at Brest for the purpose. Our pious fathers, apprised of the danger, called a meeting for fasting and prayer. While Mr. Prince was officiating and praying most devoutly to God to avert the calamity, a sudden gust of wind arose (the day had been perfectly calm and clear), so violent as to cause a loud clattering of the windows. The reverend pastor paused in his prayer, and, looking around upon the congregation with a countenance of hope, he again commenced, and with great devotional ardor supplicated the Almighty to cause that wind to frustrate the object of our enemies, and save the country from conquest and popery. A tempest ensued, in which a greater part of the French fleet was wrecked on the coast of Nova Scotia. The Duke D'Anville committed suicide. Many died with disease, and thousands were consigned to a watery grave. The small number who survived returned to France, broken in health and spirits,--the enterprise was abandoned, and never renewed." Many who were present have left accounts of Mr. Prince's earnestness on this occasion.

Probably no two men could be more devoted to the religious interests of their church and the community at large than these, yet Mr. Prince records, eighteen years after the beginning of his pastorate, that the ministers of Boston made an extraordinary effort to arrest the decay of godliness, but with no abiding results, and this was particularly noticeable in his own congregation. There seemed to be no change in this respect until the coming of Whitfield, in 1740, when he preached "to breathless thousands in the old South Church." Mr. Prince welcomed this apostle with enthusiasm. His own sermons were full of vigor, and a brilliant imagination embellished them with abundant illustrations, but depth of thought and zealous research made the majority of his writings far above the comprehension of the multitude. His printed funeral sermons are quaint in their deep, black borders, with drawings of death's heads similar to those that adorned the tombstones. His sermon after the death of George I. may have embodied the feeling prevalent at that time; but, in view of the more critical light thrown upon the character and reigns of the Georges by historians and satirists of our day, this eulogy is a curiosity, with its almost childish enthusiasm and simple-hearted loyalty. The following are passages from his sermon:--

For my part, I shall never forget the joy that swelled my heart when in the Splendid Procession, at his Coronation, preceded by all the nobles of the kingdom and his son and heir-apparent, one other hope, with their Ermine Robes and Coronets, that Royal face at length appeared, which Heaven had in that moment sent to save these Great Nations from the Brink of Ruin. Nor do I speak of it as my case alone, but as what appeared to be the equal transport of the multitudes around me. The tears of joy seemed to rise and swell in every eye, and we were hardly able to give a shout thro' the laboring passions that were swelling in us. He was in some respects a Father to the Kings of the earth, or at least a powerful and decisive mediator and umpire among them. The eyes of the greatest princes were turned to him. In these distant parts of his Dominion we have felt the happy influences of his happy reign. He was the darling and protection of his people, the great support of the reformed interest and the arbiter of Europe. George II. is a Prince of winning countenance and manly aspect, had considerable treasure of useful learning, and with him a most amiable Princess, the reigning glory of her sex for beauty, knowledge, wit, discretion, the sweetest temper, the most cheerful, affable and engaging countenance and carriage, with every charming virtue; in the bloom of her youth preferred her chaste religion to all the glories of the Imperial family, and became the love and admiration of every protestant.

President Cheney says of Mr. Prince "he may be justly characterized as one of our great men;" but he deplored that he sometimes devoted so much attention to minute and trifling circumstances of things, and gave too great credit to surprising stories. This, no doubt, may at times have been unnecessary, and would certainly be a failing at the present time, when writing on all subjects is so universal; but in Mr. Prince's case it took the form of an advantage to posterity, as this love of detail caused him to hand down to all generations the most life-like descriptions of daily life and conversation of his own and remote times. Although he saw a particular providence in every act, every word, every wind that blew, and every storm that arose, yet Mr. Sewall said of him, "that the great truths and doctrines of the Gospel were his chosen subjects. He spake as the oracles of God, as one that felt the Divine Excellence. Some of his discourses even have received impressions in England."

The great tenderness of his nature was particularly prominent in his family relations. He trained his children in the paths of knowledge, his well-disciplined mind making him a safe and wise teacher; while, like him, they were pious from their youth. His only son graduated with honor from his own college, and had just started on a literary career with flattering success, when consumption caused his death, in his twenty-fourth year. Two daughters, also, at the early ages of twenty and twenty-two, were taken from the household, and in their old age one daughter only was left to these parents. Mr. Prince's contemporaries speak of his wonderful resignation at these repeated afflictions. His sermon on the death of his daughter Deborah gives the religious experience of a young girl who, in those rigorous Calvinistic days, had her sweet young life overshadowed by the terror of God's wrath for what she considered her unbelief. A few extracts will give a good idea of Mr. Prince's impassioned, pathetic, and even dramatic style, and his apparently "trifling details" add vividness to the picture. His son besought him to dispense with the custom of a funeral oration in his case; but the feelings of the father were sacrificed to what he considered his duty to the youth of his congregation on the occasion of his daughter's death.

He said: "You have known her character; I need not give it to this assembly, and I am more especially restrained, not only by my near relation, but by what she said to me, with all the emotions of a grieved heart, three or four days before her death. 'Dear father, I have been told you speak to people in my commendation. I beg you would not. I am a poor, miserable sinner; you cannot think how it grieves me.' On these accounts I must forbear her character; but because God's dealings with her, both before and in her sickness, have been remarkable, I cannot but think it will be for his glory and your advantage to present some of them to you. As she grew up, God was pleased to refrain her from vanities, move her to study her Bible and best of authors, both of history and divinity. Dr. Watts and Mrs. Rowe's writings were familiar to her. The spirit of God worked upon her at fourteen, but she did not join the church until two years later, when she narrowly escaped drowning, in her father's bosom. For, as I had just received her in my arms, in a boat, in order to go on board a vessel in the harbor, bound to her Uncle Denny's, at Georgetown, on the Kennebec river, the boat steered off, and I fell back with her into the salt water, ten feet deep, with which she was almost filled, and we both continued under it, out of sight of her brother and sister looking on, for about a minute. If a couple of strangers from Connecticut had not been near at hand to reach her quickly, in a minute or more she had been past recovery....

"In all weathers she sought the house of God, and she was afraid of being deceived. Though her jealousies and fears were troublesome, I think they were useful. Sometimes she had light and comfort; oftener otherwise. In her twentieth year she had a fever, and from the first she thought she should not live, complained of her stupidity of mind, impenitence and unbelief. I came home from afternoon exercise, found her so ill that her mother thought herself obliged to tell her, upon which she thanked her for her kindness, but quickly fell into great distress on being unprepared for eternity. It would break a heart of stone to hear her: 'Oh! dear sir, what shall I do?' ... Oh! the horrors of that night. It was one of the most distressing I ever knew. She wouldn't close her eyes for fear of dying. In the morning was a little more resigned, fell asleep, awoke refreshed, but still in darkness. 'Oh! dear father,' she would say, 'I have dreadfully apostatized from Christ.' Mr. Sewall and I labored with her for days, but we found nobody but the Almighty could do it.

"Dr. Sewall said, 'If she died in darkness, we should have good ground to hope that she would awake in glory.' To everything he would say she would reply, 'I cannot believe.' You must be sensible of a distressed father's heart, putting his soul in her soul's place for many weeks.

"Incessant prayers were offered for her in public and private, by relations and friends who loved her, but until the last half hour of her life were unanswered. She was in agonies of death all the while Mr. Sewall was praying. When he and the physician left, I told her they could do nothing more. She was calm and composed, but did not speak.... It was so dismal to see her depart in darkness. Oh! the distress in that room. I held her in my arms, she opened her eyes and spoke a new language: 'Oh! I love the Lord with all my heart. I see such an amiableness in him, I prize him above a thousand worlds.' I said, 'Dear child, what have you to say to me?'--'Oh! sir, that you may be more fervent in your ministry, in exhorting and expostulating with sinners.' I never saw such a change in a sick room, from distress to joy when I reported her words. I could scarcely have thought a father, mother, brother and sister could have been so transported in the expiring moments of one so dear to them."

This discourse was published in Edinboro' after his death. His daughter Sarah, afterwards wife of Lieut.-Gov. Gill, survived her parents a few years, but died, without children in 1771. She was also deeply religious, and some of her writings were published in Edinboro' after her death.

Mr. Prince's life, aside from his domestic afflictions, seems to have flowed on in peaceful paths, that ran their quiet course between the hardships of the early years of the colonies and the rising passions and frequent strifes that reigned, particularly in New England, for years before the Revolutionary war. His whole nature, tuned to harmony and peaceful avocations, developed in its proper channel. The comparative quiet of the first half of the eighteenth century permitted a thorough devotion to his allotted pursuits. His forty years' pastorate in Boston left their trace of love and good-will in seed which can never be destroyed, and his indefatigable industry and painstaking perseverance are lessons that could be of benefit to all generations.

He inherited a large property from his father. Beside other lands, acquired and inherited, he owned the tract which is covered by the town of Princeton, including Wachusett mountain, the town deriving its name from him. In the Boylston Mansion at Princeton, there is a beautiful crayon portrait of Mrs. Sarah Gill, his daughter, executed by Copley. There is also a fine tall clock, which belonged to Mr. Prince, in the possession of Mrs. Addison Denny, at Leicester. Mr. Prince brought it with him from England in 1717; the whole case is in raised Japanese work, and the face decorations very elaborate. It was made by Thomas Wagstaffe, of London, and his descendants still make clocks at the same shop, by hand and under the same name.

Mr. Prince died in 1757, after a year's illness, at seventy-two years of age. The _Weekly Gazette_ said, in announcing his death: "His performances in pulpit evidence a vast compass of thought, a sublime imagination, a great faith and zeal. In printed composures there is a fertility of invention, correctness of sentiment, sprightliness of expression, that must delight every reader, and transmit his name to posterity in the most advantageous light. His private life was amiable and exemplary, adorned with grace and virtues. A useful member of civil society. His consort has lost an affectionate husband; his only surviving daughter, a tender father; his servants, an indulgent master; his acquaintances, a kind, condescending friend; his church, an enlightened and vigilant pastor; his country, a zealous advocate of civil and religious liberty. Took farewell to this world with humble resignation to the will of God, and entire dependence on our Lord Jesus Christ, and a good hope of Immortality."

NEW ENGLAND MANNERS AND CUSTOMS IN THE TIME OF BRYANT'S EARLY LIFE.

BY MRS. H. G. ROWE.

Ninety-one years ago, in the little town of Cummington, Mass., was born a child, who was destined, in after years, to be the first of a grand line of American poets, who have made this, the second century of our Republic, famous by their genius and originality.

Not long since, in looking over an old magazine, published in Philadelphia in 1809, I came across quite an extended review of Campbell's, then just issued, poem, "Gertrude of Wyoming," and was not a little amused at the closing comments.

After a little mild praise, and a good deal of equally mild criticism, of the Scotch poet, the editor goes on to say:--

"But, after all, although lesser poets are constantly rising above the literary horizon, challenging the admiration of the reading world for a few short months,--possibly years,--and then sinking into the obscurity of a forgotten past, the sun of English poetry has set forever. With Pope, Milton, and Dryden, England lost her last true poets. Henceforth all who claim that title must be more or less skilful _imitators_ merely of the great masters who have gone before them.

"As for America," he continues, with the most unpatriotic candor, "there is not the smallest chance of her ever producing a real poet. Ingenious scribblers she may have, without doubt, but the typical American never had or will have one grain of poetry in his hard, shrewd, matter-of-fact nature."

This was the verdict of a Philadelphia editor seventy-six years ago. To-day the bust of our own Longfellow stands in Westminster Abbey, side by side with a Chaucer and a Shakspere, while not only the English-speaking world on both sides of the ocean, but the dwellers in sunny Italy, upon the frozen steppes of Russia, and in far-off Japan and India, sing and repeat, each in his own tongue, the stirring battle-hymns and sweet home-songs of the gifted singers of our Western World.

We are often reminded that a writer's environments have much to do with the character of his writings, and in Bryant's case this fact is particularly noticeable.

His earliest poems, and especially that great masterpiece, "Thanatopsis," written at the early age of eighteen, show unmistakably that the boy had grown up in the closest familiarity with the theological tenets of the New England of his day, and that the bent of his young mind was, even then, toward graver subjects than would naturally occupy the thoughts of a boy of that age.

His biographers assert that he drew his inspiration for this grand poem from the pages of Kirke White and Southey. But whatever his acquaintance with these poets may have done for him, there is a striking similarity of imagery and sentiment between his own and the writings of the sacred bards, whose utterances were as familiar to the children of a Christian household in those days as their own childish nursery songs and hymns.

For instance, compare these lines from "Thanatopsis" with a well-known passage in the Book of Job:--

"... Yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep,--the dead reign there alone."

The sacred poet says:--

"Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb. The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him, and every man shall draw after him as there are innumerable before him."

Then, again, in "The Old Man's Funeral":--

"Then rose another hoary man, and said, In faltering accents, to that weeping train: 'Why mourn ye that our aged friend is dead? Ye are not sad to see the gathered grain.'"

Compare this with:

"Thou shall come to the grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season."

Examples similar to these occur in many of Bryant's poems, and tend to show the result of the early religious training, that, as the son of a thoughtful, God-fearing New England gentleman of that day, he most certainly did receive.

That he was intensely, grandly, sometimes fiercely patriotic, is also due, in a great measure, to the surrounding influences of his young life.

The struggle for American independence was at last over, and the lusty young Republic, springing, Minerva-like, from the mighty brain of a no longer imperilled freedom, was ready to throw down the gauntlet of defiance to all the world, and assert her rights as queen regnant of the great Western World.

The armies had been disbanded, and the war-scarred veterans had joyfully returned to their farms and workshops, ready to put their willing hands again to the plough and the plane, and help to restore, by patient toil and honest legislation, prosperity and peace to the land so long distracted by the commotions and uncertainties of war.

Later, his days of toil over, the old soldier sat him down, in restful content, by his own peaceful fireside, while, with the old musket in its honored place above the tall wooden mantle, he fought over again, in memory, his old-time battles, and to sons and grandsons taught, in thrilling, patriotic words, the great lesson to love and revere their country next to their God.

As a boy, no doubt, young Bryant had listened to many of the tales of these honored veterans, and had drank in, with the air of his own native village, long draughts of their fervid patriotism, that animated his writings down to the latest years of his life.

That he had seen with his own eyes some of the leading spirits in that great national struggle, who still lived to honor and be honored by the nation that they had fought so bravely to free from a foreign yoke, is shown by an extract from one of his few humorous poems, in which he says:--

"I pause to state That I, too, have seen greatness--even I-- Shook hands with Adams, stared at Lafayette, When, barehead, in the hot noon of July, He would not let the umbrella be held o'er him, For which three cheers burst from the mob before him."

Patriotic, religious, philosophical, and a true lover of nature, yet Bryant cannot, in any mood, be styled one of our fireside poets, like Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell.

Perhaps he failed to see in the then bare loneliness of the typical New England home a beauty worth the attention of his fastidious and lofty-minded muse. And that New England homes, at that time, were bare of what we, to-day, deem the absolute necessities of life, no student of the past pretends to deny.

The long war had drained and impoverished the country; our manufactures and commerce were then in their infancy; the whole machinery of our recently organized government was new, and the hands that worked it, however wise and brave they might be, were untried, and had much to learn before the ponderous works could be brought into perfect running order.

Worst of all, President Jefferson, in 1807, laid an embargo upon American shipping, thus unwittingly striking a terrible blow at our foreign commerce, in his endeavor to force England into an amicable settlement of certain difficulties that had arisen between her and the young Republic. This, and the two years' war with England, that broke out in 1812, made hard times for everybody, and taxed the magnanimity and skill of our foremothers to their utmost to make their homes and families present a decent and respectable appearance.

The very poor then, as now, were forced to content themselves with the barest decencies of life. But the respectable middle classes,--the farmers, mechanics, and small merchants,--were put to the greatest straits to keep up an appearance of respectability and comfort, with scant conveniences, and few or none of even the simplest elegancies of life, in dwelling, dress, or furniture.

The principal room of a New England farm-house was the kitchen, which was usually large enough to serve for a cooking, dining, and sitting room, all in one.

The enormous fireplace, with its long, soot-blackened crane, hung with hooks of various sizes, the massive iron andirons, strong enough to hold the great birch and birchen logs, that often taxed the strength of a full-grown man to lift and adjust in their places, occupied a large part of one side of the room, and served as a kind of family altar, about which the family, with their guests and friends, always assembled, in quiet chat or friendly gossip.

And a cheery spot it was, especially in those long, dark evenings in midwinter, when the ruddy, dancing flames went laughing up the great throat of the chimney, chasing the venturesome, wayward sparks, as they hurried out into the untried darkness of the winter's night. With what a genial glow they lighted up the bare, unplastered walls, the sanded floor, the rough rafters overhead, and the scant, clumsily-fashioned furniture, until

"The rude, bare-raftered room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom."

Nor must we forget that seldom wanting, always interesting, piece of furniture, to which was sure to be accorded the warmest, coziest spot in the wide chimney-corner,--the inevitable wooden cradle,--clumsily fashioned by loving, but unskilled hands, and always large enough to hold, besides the reigning baby, two, and, at a pinch, three, of the younger members of the household.

How the favored youngsters delighted in a ride in that clumsy old vehicle, nor dreamed that its halting, uncertain gait was other than the very poetry of motion! Even mother's own wooden rocking-chair, a bit of boughten elegance, with its gay patchwork cushion, and dull, contented "creak! creak!" as its dear occupant swayed meditatively to and fro, knitting in hand, in the quiet, restful gloaming, was not quite equal to that dear, delightful old cradle, for a good brisk canter to "Banbury Cross," or to the famous hunting grounds, where "Baby Bunting's rabbit skin" was waiting for him.

Many a man, and woman too, whose names are, to-day, blessed and honored by thousands of grateful hearts all over the land, dreamed then their first misty, childish dreams of a grand and helpful manhood and womanhood, and felt swelling up within their young souls inexpressible longings to help right the wrongs of the down-trodden and oppressed, which they heard their elders talk of, and deplore as past remedy.