A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel
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and cut and split it; and his alacrity and vigor infused themselves into the children. I recollect particularly that if, on such nights as this, when to the high wind severe cold and thick darkness were added, my father had appointments, he always fulfilled them. It was customary to have preaching-places all around the neighborhood, here, there, and everywhere; and I never knew him to think of shrinking from an appointment, or holding himself back for a moment, on account of the weather. There never was a snow so deep, or a wind so high, or a rain so driving, or a night so black that the thought seemed to enter his head that he must give up a meeting. I have many times seen him, on cold, bitter nights, take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, and go forth into the storm without seeming to dread it; and often, as I have remembered it, I have wished I could put on his spirit in the same way. He did it as a matter of course. And such was the effect of his example on his children that there was not one of them that would not be ashamed to show the ‘white feather’ in the presence of external difficulties.
“When I was a boy I learned some hymns, and committed to memory an indefinite number of texts, and waded a certain distance into the catechism, never getting through it; and I forgot them again very quickly. But I do not think all of them put together exerted any material influence upon me one way or the other—they did not remain in my mind to be understood when I was older; but a great many things which my father did, but which neither he nor anybody else spoke of, have had a strong influence on my whole life. For instance, his defying the elements, making himself master in every condition and under all circumstances, and exhibiting an indomitable pluck which did not pause nor shrink—that made a powerful impression upon me, and has been one of the reasons of the success of my life; not just here and now, but in my earlier career, when I was in the West on the frontier, and when I was very poor and had to do a great deal of rough work under circumstances of discouragement. I had an ideal of what a man should be and should do, and it stood me in stead better than any amount of catechetical instruction could have done.”
So joined these—the stepmother, the mother, the humble servant in the family, Charles Smith the happy Christian black man, Aunt Esther, and the father—hand-in-hand with nature, with the life and events that were moving on around them, and with God, in directing and moulding him in every part in these early years.
There were none of them, perhaps, unusual, certainly not unprecedented; for others besides Henry Ward Beecher have had heavenly-minded and large-hearted mothers; others, as well as he, have been trained in conscientiousness and have had a happy Christian example set before them, and have enjoyed the influence of fathers full of manly inspiration, while God and nature have been with and around them, and yet no such marked results have been seen as in him. Something native there was in the soil that enabled it to respond to such genial influences with such unusual fruitage. We are driven, in accounting for this, to that especial endowment that was given to him and withheld from others through the will of One who gives to every man according to His own good pleasure. “And to one He gave five talents.”
His appearance and attainments at this time are thus summed up by Mrs. Stowe: “Henry was now ten years old, a stocky, strong, well-grown boy, loyal to duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism which were always reverberating in his hearing; … but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state, a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity. …
“He was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes for dulness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory—a deficiency marked in him through life. He was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotions which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator! ‘When Henry is sent to me with a message,’ said a good aunt, ‘I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; the second I catch a word now and then; by the third time I begin to understand.’ ”
Of the bashfulness referred to in the above he says: “We had our own fill of it in childhood. To walk into a room where ‘company’ was assembled, and to do it erectly and naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly. The sensations of sensibility were dissolving. Our back-bone 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.”
Healthy, robust, frolicksome, conscientious, obedient, loving, and efficient, but bashful in the extreme and backward in all his studies, is the summing-up that we must make of Henry Ward Beecher at this period of his life.
CHAPTER IV.
Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous Incidents—Religious Experience.
To remedy the marked defects in his training, noticed in the preceding chapter, something must be done, or this boy will fail not only of becoming a student but of acquiring even a decent common-school education. Mr. Brace’s select school was tried for a year, but with little benefit. After a good many family discussions and some correspondence it was decided to place him in a private school in the village of Bethlehem, seven miles distant from his home, under the care of Mr. Langdon, to begin study in earnest. Of this important era, his first going from home, we have not a syllable, as we are aware, from his own pen or lips. That there was a mingled feeling of pain at leaving home, of pleasure in the novelty, and a shrinking from the new faces and the new duties, every one who remembers this epoch in his own life can readily imagine. The ride, for a large part of the distance across a broad plateau that stretched away cold and strange like the Downs of England, was well calculated to awaken that yearning sadness which was so prominent a feature of his secret experiences from childhood, and gave in part that tone of melancholy which appears so markedly in everything that we know of him at this period.
Singularly enough, he boarded with the grandmother of the one who afterwards became his son-in-law and is now aiding to write this biography. Her name was Ingersoll, and she is well described as a “large-hearted, kindly woman, a widow, living in a great, comfortable farm-house where everything was free and unconstrained.”
He was well remembered by my mother, Mrs. Martha Ingersoll Scoville, who, being somewhat older than he, had him much under her care. She said he was always a good boy about the house, but very bashful. “I used to feel very sorry for him, he seemed so homesick. He liked to be off by himself, wandering around in the woods, and I don’t think he studied much.”
The Ingersoll House.
This was true. Whether it was because this first separation from home brought an increase of those gloomy yearnings of heartsickness to which he was subject at times through life, or simply because of his innate dislike to the study of mere names and forms of things, that he failed to make progress in his books, no one knows. We only know on the authority of his sister, Mrs. Stowe, that “Henry’s studies were mostly with gun on shoulder roving the depths of the forest, guiltless of hitting anything because the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Whence returning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat—an exercise from which he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally.” This was not understood at home at the time, and Dr. Beecher writes concerning him:
“Mr. Langdon