A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel
Читать онлайн книгу.
then at me. I never could make up my mind whether it was admiration or suspicion that his face expressed. But I wanted him, and panted to have him ask me, ‘Where did you get all of this ten-dollar bill?’
“However, I concluded that the expression was one of genuine admiration. With my books under my arm (I never to this day could get over the disposition to carry home my own packages) I returned to college, and placed on my table my volumes of Burke! I tried to hide from myself that I had a vain purpose in it, that I was waiting to see Bannister’s surprises and to hear Howard’s exclamation, and to have it whispered in the class-room: ‘I say! have you heard that Beecher has got a splendid copy of Burke?’
“After this 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!
“As I look back on the influence of this struggle for books I cannot deny that it has been salutary. I do not believe that I spent ten dollars in all my college course for horses or amusements of any kind. But at my graduation I owned about fifty volumes. The getting of these volumes was not the least important element of my college education. There are two kinds of property which tend to moralize life. What they are I will tell you some other time, if you will coax me.”
His reading, as we have said, was very largely of the old English writers, whom he studied until the flavor of their language had been so thoroughly appropriated that it is very plainly discernible in all his early public writings. An old poet, Daniel, who belonged to the times of Spenser and Shakspere, was a great favorite of his. In a sermon preached in 1862 he quotes the poem that especially pleased him. We quote it entire with his introduction, and venture to say that the mind that makes choice of such a poem is sound and healthy at the core:
“I remembered a poem that I had read in my youth, and that I used to hang over with great interest. It had a strange fascination for me then. The writer was born in 1562, and he wrote it somewhere between that time and 1600. It has had a good long swing, and it will go rolling down a great many years yet:
“ ‘He that of such a height hath built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong,
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolvèd powers, nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace or to disturb the same—
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey?
“ ‘And with how free an eye doth he look down
Upon these lower regions of turmoil!
Where all the storms of passions mainly beat
On flesh and blood; where honor, power, renown
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil;
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet
As frailty doth, and only great doth seem
To little minds, who do it so esteem.
“ ‘He looks upon the mightiest monarch’s wars
But only as on stately robberies;
Where evermore the fortune that prevails
Must be the right; the ill-succeeding mars
The fairest and the best-fac’d enterprise.
Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails:
Justice, he sees (as if seduced), still
Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill.
“ ‘He sees the face of right as manifold
As are the passions of uncertain man,
Who puts it in all colors, all attires,
To serve his ends and make his courses hold.
He sees that, let deceit work what it can,
Plot and contrive base ways to high desires,
That the all-guiding Providence doth yet
All disappoint, and mocks the smoke of wit.
“ ‘Nor is he moved with all the thunder-cracks
Of tyrants’ threats, or with the surly brow
Of Pow’r, that proudly sits on others’ crimes,
Charg’d with more crying sins than those he checks.
The storms of sad confusion that may grow
Up in the present for the coming times,
Appall not him, that hath no side at all
But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.
“ ‘Although his heart (so near allied to earth)
Cannot but pity the perplexèd state
Of troublous and distressed mortality,
That thus make way unto the ugly birth
Of their own sorrows, and do still beget
Affliction upon imbecility:
Yet, seeing thus the course of things must run,
He looks thereon not strange, but as foredone.
“ ‘And whilst distraught ambition compasses,
And is encompassed; whilst as craft deceives,
And is deceived: whilst man doth ransack man,
And builds on blood, and rises by distress,
And th’ inheritance of desolation leaves
To great-expecting hopes: he looks thereon
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in impiety.’ ”
Such is the record of Henry Ward Beecher in college. It is one of which none need be ashamed. It may be pondered with advantage and followed with profit by every one standing himself upon the threshold of that eventful period in his own life. It is the record of a man who was loyal to duty, to truth and purity. Independent in his line of thought and study, yet obedient to the government of the college, industrious and aspiring, his course was essentially a period of education, a drawing out of his powers, a training-school of his whole nature, a fitting preparation for that high place which he came ultimately to fill in the confidence and affection of the nation and the world.
CHAPTER VIII.
Lane Seminary—Dr. Beecher Called—Home at Walnut Hills—Amusing Incidents—Family Meeting—Death of Mrs. Beecher—Extracts from Journal—First Mention of Preaching in the West—Experience in Ecclesiastical Matters—Despondency—Meeting of Synod—Influences of the Times—Revulsion—A Rift along the Horizon—“Full iolly Knight.”
At the close of his college course, after a two-days’ visit to Sutton with Miss Bullard, he started for Cincinnati to begin his theological studies at Lane Seminary, of which institution his father had been elected president and professor of theology, and whither he had moved with his family two years before. The Seminary, located at Walnut Hills, two miles out of the city, had been established for the sake of supplying preachers and pastors for the great and growing West. It was thought that the territory traversed by the Ohio and the Mississippi was “the valley of decision” for the great interests of our country and of the world. To meet the emergency and take possession of this broad domain for Christ, its rightful