unborn self.

I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me.
His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me
that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have
pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat
of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo
et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find one's self
in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days, I am
afraid, after that entry in his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall was chosen
President, for his Piety."

There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable
countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown
older. Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-olds
three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale; but age
magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old people are a
kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it
may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved
features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details, like
so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be. The
middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint impressions in my
memory, but how grandly the procession of the old clergymen who filled
our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof, marches
before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood,
the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy
over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of
Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth,
which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect;
and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of
Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first living
person ever pointed out to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason Harris of
Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand,
being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was
adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring
of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in
decad