Part 30
While he enjoyed England, he was thoroughly American. He wrote from London, "I think that the more one travels here the more he feels that, while there is very much to admire and desire in these English ways, the simplicity and directness of our American fashions of doing things are far more satisfactory."
Two weeks later he preached a Christmas sermon at the Church of the Incarnation, New York, for his brother, Dr. Arthur Brooks. This was the day of all days which he loved. He enjoyed giving and receiving Christmas gifts.
He said in his sermon, "One of the very wonderful things about our human life is the perpetual freshness, the indestructible joy, that clings forever about the idea of birth. You cannot find the hovel so miserable, the circumstances and the prospects of life so wretched, that it is not a bright and glorious thing for a child to be born there.
"Hope flickers up for an instant from its embers at the first breathing of the baby's breath. No squalidness of the life into which it came can make the new life seem squalid at its coming. By and by it will grow dull and gray, perhaps, in sad harmony with its sad surroundings; but at the first there is some glory in it, and for a moment it burns bright upon the bosom of the dulness where it has fallen, and seems as if it ought to set it afire.
"And so there was nothing that could with such vividness represent the newness of Christianity in the world as to have it forever associated with the birth of a child.
"It is a strange, a wonderful, birth.... I do not care to understand that story fully. It is enough for me that in it there is represented the full truth about the wondrous child of Christmas Day. He is the child of heaven and earth together. It is the spontaneous utterance of the celestial life. It is likewise the answer to the cry of need with which every hill and valley of the earth has rung, that lies here in the cradle....
"The humble birth of Jesus in the stable of the inn at Bethlehem was a proclamation of the insignificance of circumstances in the greatest moments and experiences of life."
A few days later, Jan. 14, 1893, Bishop Brooks took cold at the consecration of a church in East Boston, and a soreness of throat resulted. Five days later, Thursday, he seemed somewhat ill, and went to bed. A physician came, but no alarm was felt. Sunday night the throat grew diphtheretic, and the bishop became delirious. Monday morning, Jan. 23, at 6.30, Phillips Brooks ceased to breathe.
His last words, spoken to his brother William and the faithful servants and nurse who stood by the bedside, as he waved his hand, were, "Good-by; I am going home. I will see you in the morning."
The sad news could scarcely be believed. The great, strong man, bishop for only a year and three months, had fallen in his very prime. Men's faces were blanched, and women wept. The poor and the rich had a common sorrow. Even children felt the bereavement. A little five-year-old girl was told by her mother that "Bishop Brooks had gone to heaven."
The child knew and loved him, and had always delighted to meet him. "O mamma!" she replied, "how happy the angels will be!"
On Thursday, Jan. 26, Bishop Brooks was buried. No other funeral was ever like it in Boston. At 7.45 in the morning the coffin was borne from the bishop's residence, at the corner of Clarendon and Newbury Streets, to the vestibule of Trinity Church, accompanied by a guard of the Loyal Legion, of which Phillips Brooks was chaplain. The colors of the Loyal Legion covered the coffin, on which lay some Easter lilies among palms.
It is estimated that from eight to eleven o'clock twelve or fifteen thousand persons passed by the body as it lay in state, and looked once more upon the face of the man they loved and honored. A heavy plate glass was over the face, and the coffin was hermetically sealed.
Rich and poor, children and adults, sobbed as they passed on. A gray-haired and very poorly dressed woman drew a cluster of roses from her bosom, and, with tears flowing down her cheeks, laid them reverently upon the casket.
A pale-faced woman, with a little boy scantily dressed for the winter weather, who could not enter the church for the crowd, begged a policeman to let her in. He replied brusquely, telling her to get into line.
"Oh, but I must see him once more!" she sobbed; "he paid for the operation which gave sight to my boy, and I must see him again."
The people about her were moved by her entreaty, and an usher quietly told the officer to allow the mother and her child to come in.
Meantime Trinity Church had become filled with the various delegations,--from Harvard College, Boston University, the Governor and Committee of the Legislature, clergymen from a distance, theological schools, officers of the Young Men's Christian Association and Young Men's Christian Union, and various other organizations.
The church was beautifully decorated. At the back of the chancel was an arch of laurel, fifteen feet high and nine feet wide, with a spruce-tree eight feet high on each side. In front of this was a tall cross of Easter lilies, and the baptismal font was filled with the same flowers. Roses and lilies sent by friends were heaped everywhere, although a request had been made that no flowers should be sent.
Among the flowers was a cross with the words, "From Helen." This was the gift of the little blind girl, Helen Keller, at the South Boston Institute for the Blind, of whom the dead preacher was very fond.
Just before noon the body, borne on the shoulders of eight strong men, picked from the various athletic teams of Harvard, passed up the aisle of the church, headed by the bishops and honorary pall-bearers. The whole congregation joined in singing "Jesus, lover of my soul," the music broken by audible sobbing. After brief services, while the people remained standing, and the organ played its low, solemn notes, the body was borne out into Copley Square in front of Trinity, and placed on a draped platform, where an out-door service was held for the more than twenty thousand persons who could not get inside the church.
A memorial service was held at the same hour in the First Baptist Church, near by.
After the Lord's Prayer, in which all joined, the hymn beginning,--
"O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home;"
was sung. Copies of it had been distributed among the people. Three cornetists led the singing.
It was an hour never to be forgotten. Eyes unused to tears were wet that day.
The funeral procession of fifty carriages then moved towards Mount Auburn, across Harvard Bridge, through a line of thousands of people. Places of business throughout the city were closed, and the bells upon the churches and public buildings in Boston and other cities were tolled.
When the head of the procession reached Beck Hall, Cambridge, the university bell began tolling, with the old bell in Harvard Hall, and the bells of Christ Church, chiming,--
"Heaven's morning breaks And earth's vain shadows flee."
Two thousand college students, standing several deep, with heads uncovered, were formed in two lines from the University building to the West Gate. Through their ranks, entering from Harvard Street, the body of their beloved preacher was borne. "Never in all our college life," writes Dr. McKenzie, "has there been a burial like his."
From the college grounds the procession moved to Mount Auburn, where the brothers, John and Arthur, conducted the services. Flowers, which the dead bishop loved, lay everywhere upon the pure, white snow,--lilies, roses, carnations, and sheaves of wheat. The fence about the family lot was hung with ivy and violets tied with purple ribbon.
The crowd drew aside to let three weeping women look into the open grave, before the dirt fell upon the coffin. They were three sisters,--servants who had long ministered in the bishop's home, and whose devotion had been repaid by constant appreciation and kindness.
The world went back to its work, but we are never the same after a great life has touched our own. Phillips Brooks said in his sermon on "Withheld Completion of Life," "The ideal life is in our blood, and never will be still. We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are. Every time we see a man who has attained our human ideal a little more fully than we have, it awakens our languid blood and fills us with new longings."
All who ever knew or heard Phillips Brooks will forever strive after his unselfishness, his courage, his thoughtfulness, his eagerness to make the world better.
Bishop William Lawrence, who succeeded Phillips Brooks, wrote of him in the March-April, 1893, _Andover Review_, "When all has been said about his eloquence, his mastery of language, and his tumult of thought, we are turned back to the thought that the sermons were great because the man was great. His was a great soul. He stood above us; he moved in higher realms of thought and life; he had a wider sweep of spiritual vision; he was gigantic. And yet he was so completely one of us, so sympathetic, childlike, and naturally simple, that it was often only by an effort of thought that we could realize that he was great. Kingly in character, we buried him like a king."
Memorial services were held in scores of churches; in Boston, in Lowell, in Worcester, in New York, in Maine, in Rhode Island, and elsewhere. At the old South Church in Boston, Protestants and Roman Catholics united in the service.
The Rev. Dr. Philip S. Moxom of the First Baptist Church well said of Phillips Brooks, "He was a loyal Episcopalian in the very best sense in which a man can be loyal to the church of his choice; but he was not and could not be confined in the Episcopal Church. He belonged to no church or party or sect; rather he belonged to all churches and parties and sects in so far as they represent elemental truths and express elemental sympathies. The Congregationalists claimed him, the Unitarians claimed him, the Baptists claimed him, the Methodists claimed him; and the claims of all were just, because beneath all these names and party badges is the common human heart and the one universal church of God; and to that human and that church of God, Phillips Brooks belonged." The next generation will not remember the rush of his voice in the pulpit, or the warm clasp of his hand, or his kindling eye, but his influence will go on forever.
As he himself said, "He whose life grows abundant grows into sympathy with the lives of fellow-men, as when one pool among the many on the seashore rocks fills itself full, it overflows, and becomes one with the other pools, making them also one with each other all over the broad expanse."
For such a life there are no seashore limits; no limits of time or space. His words will have fulfilment. We shall "see him in the morning."
Mrs. Sarah K. Bolton's Famous Books.
"_The most interesting books to me are the histories of individuals and individual minds, all autobiographies, and the like. This is my favorite reading._"--H. W. Longfellow.
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POOR BOYS WHO BECAME FAMOUS.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. Short biographical sketches of George Peabody, Michael Faraday, Samuel Johnson, Admiral Farragut, Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, Garibaldi, President Lincoln, and other noted persons who, from humble circumstances, have risen to fame and distinction, and left behind an imperishable record. Illustrated with 24 portraits. 12mo. $1.50.
"It is seldom that a book passes under our notice which we feel impelled to commend so highly to young readers, and especially to boys."--_N. Y. Observer._
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GIRLS WHO BECAME FAMOUS.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. Biographical sketches of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Helen Hunt Jackson, Harriet Hosmer, Rosa Bonheur, Florence Nightingale, Maria Mitchell, and other eminent women. Illustrated with portraits. 12mo. $1.50.
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FAMOUS MEN OF SCIENCE.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. Short biographical sketches of Galileo, Newton, Linnæus, Cuvier, Humboldt, Audubon, Agassiz, Darwin, Buckland, and others. Illustrated with 15 portraits. 12mo. $1.50.
"Cannot fail to delight, interest, and instruct every boy or girl who may have the good fortune to read it."--_Queries._
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FAMOUS ENGLISH AUTHORS OF THE 19th CENTURY.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. With portraits of Scott, Burns, Carlyle, Dickens, Tennyson, Robert Browning, etc. 12mo. $1.50.
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FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS.
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FAMOUS EUROPEAN ARTISTS.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. With portraits of Raphael, Titian, Landseer, Reynolds, Rubens, Turner, and others. 12mo. $1.50.
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STORIES FROM LIFE. (_FICTION._)
By SARAH K. BOLTON. A book of short stories, charming and helpful. 12mo. $1.25.
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FAMOUS TYPES OF WOMANHOOD.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. With portraits of Queen Louise, Madam Recamier, Miss Dix, Jenny Lind, Susanna Wesley, Harriet Martineau, Amelia B. Edwards, and Mrs. Judson.
12mo. $1.50.
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FAMOUS VOYAGERS AND EXPLORERS.
By SARAH K. BOLTON. With portraits of Raleigh, Sir John Franklin, Magellan, Dr. Kane, Greely, Livingstone, and others. 12mo. $1.50.
OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION.
_For sale by all booksellers, or sent, postpaid, upon receipt of price by the publishers. Catalogues sent free upon application._
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.,
NEW YORK AND BOSTON.
Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton
Comes from good New England ancestry; descended on her father's side from Henry Knowles, who came to Rhode Island from London, England, in 1635, and on her mother's side from Colonel Nathaniel Stanley, of Hartford, Conn., one of the leading men of the colony, and from Colonel William Pynchon, one of the twenty-six incorporators of Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was graduated from the Hartford Seminary, established by Catharine Beecher; published a volume of poems, and in 1860 married Charles E. Bolton, A.M., of Massachusetts, an Amherst College graduate of '65. They removed to Cleveland, O., where, besides writing for various periodicals, she did much charitable work. She was secretary of the Woman's Christian Association, and Asst. Cor. Sec. of the Nat. W. C. T. U. She has twice visited Europe, spending two years in England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Norway, and Sweden studying literary and educational matters, and the means used by employers for the mental and moral elevation of their employees. On the latter subject she read a paper before the American Social Science Association in 1883. She was for three years one of the editors of the Boston _Congregationalist_. She prepared several small books for the Cleveland Educational Bureau, conducted gratuitously by her husband, and described by Dr. Washington Gladden in the _Century_ magazine, January, 1885. The Bureau was discontinued when Mr. Bolton gave his time to lecturing.
[Illustration]
Mrs. Bolton has written: How Success is Won, 1884; Poor Boys who became Famous, 1885; Girls who became Famous, 1886; Stories from Life (fiction), 1886; Social Studies in England, 1886; Famous American Authors, 1887; From Heart and Nature (poems), 1887, half the book written by her son, Charles Knowles Bolton, Harvard College, class '90; Famous American Statesmen, 1888; Some Successful Women, 1888; Famous Men of Science, 1889; Famous English Authors of the Nineteenth Century, 1890; Famous European Artists, 1890; Famous English Statesmen of Queen Victoria's Reign, 1891; Famous Types of Womanhood, 1892.
Miss Frances E. Willard says of Mrs. Bolton, "She is one of the best-informed women in America, the chief woman biographer of our times."
Mrs. Bolton's books are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent postpaid upon receipt of price by the publishers. Complete catalogue sent free to any address upon application.
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO., New York and Boston.
End of Project Gutenberg's Famous leaders among men, by Sarah Knowles Bolton