y and
impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic
orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like Cicero's, and his
toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever
might have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid grace that he
might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the
side of the antiques of the Vatican.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking
of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health gives
a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed course
which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest and the
fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the transient
ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before the
procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to
be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy,
as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as old
doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their later
days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long and so
exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the mediaeval
schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world is
waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these
wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of
an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part heard
of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which was the
more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we debated.
Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away early, and
padding the other with prosperity so that his course was comparatively
noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one in particular,
"The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong
obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan, which the
community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger of
the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a