Part 17

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!"

Some of this time was darkened by doubt and disbelief; but, like John Bunyan, after about two years of unsettled condition of mind, peace was assured. "It came to me," he says, "like the bursting of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners,--not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better,--because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me.... Never for a single moment have I doubted the power of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have doubted the existence in the heaven of the sun by day and the moon by night."

The second Mrs. Beecher had died, triumphing in her faith. Dr. Beecher, tried for heresy, was fighting theological battles, which his son Henry learned to abhor.

"I see no benefit in a controversy," he wrote. "It will be a fierce technical dispute about propositions, at the expense in the churches of vital godliness.... Others may blow the bellows, and turn the doctrines in the fire, and lay them on the anvil of controversy, and beat them with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes; but I shall busy myself with _using_ the sword of the Lord, not in _forging_ it."

Pro-slavery riots had begun, and the printing-press of James G. Birney was destroyed by a mob of Kentucky slaveholders. Young Beecher was sworn in as a special constable, and for several nights, well armed, patrolled the streets with others, to protect the colored people. He was learning bravery early, and he had need of it through life.

Mr. Beecher graduated in 1837 from Lane Seminary, and through the influence of a Yankee woman, Martha Sawyer, was asked to go to Lawrenceburg, Ind., to preach. "There was a church in that place," says Mr. Beecher, "composed of about twenty members, of which she was the factotum. She collected the money, she was the treasurer, she was the manager, she was the trustee, she was the everything of that church."

There were about fifteen hundred persons in the little town, situated at the junction of the Ohio and Miami Rivers. There were four big distilleries in the place, and a steamboat load of liquor was carried away from it every day.

"When I went there and entered upon my vocation of preaching," says Mr. Beecher, "I found a church, occupying a little brick building, with nineteen or twenty members. There was one man, and the rest were women. With the exception of two persons, there was not one of them who was not obliged to gain a livelihood by the labor of the hands. So you will understand how very poor they were....

"I was sexton in the church. There were no lamps there, so I went and bought some and filled them and lit them. I swept the church, and lighted my own fires. I did not ring the bell because there was none. I opened the church before every meeting, and shut and locked it after every meeting. I took care of everything in the church."

The salary was to be $300--it was raised from $250--of which the Home Missionary Society was to give $150.

His friends in Cincinnati opposed his going to so small a field; but he carried out the advice which he gave years afterward to theological students: "_Don't hang_ round idle, waiting for a _good offer_. Enter the first field God opens for you. If he needs you in a larger one, he will open the gate for you to enter."

Young Beecher, having waited nearly seven years to claim his bride,--he was now but twenty-four,--wrote to Miss Bullard that he would be ready for the marriage Aug. 3. Arriving at her home on the evening of July 29, he picked over and stoned with her the raisins for the wedding-cake, beat the eggs, and in every way helped on the joyful event. At the hour chosen for the ceremony, a heavy thunder-storm came on. The bride determined to wait; and an hour after the appointed time, under a brilliant rainbow, they were married, and started for their missionary labors in the West.

They boarded for a short time, and then decided to go to housekeeping. Mrs. Beecher, during the absence of her husband at a synodical meeting, found two rooms over a stable, at a rental of forty dollars per year. She went to Cincinnati by boat, to the home of the Beechers, and received, to help in furnishing these rooms, a bedstead, a stove, some sheets and pillow-cases, and a piece of carpet. Through the sale of her cloak for thirty dollars, she obtained a husk mattress, a table, wash-tubs, and groceries.

On Mr. Beecher's return he helped scrub the floors--the landlord objected to their being painted, as it _would injure the wood_!