a student stood ready to take
his hat and overcoat and hang them up in their places; while he went
directly to his stand--a high pine desk; threw his left elbow upon it;
dropped his head so low that his eyes could not be seen; tilted the desk
over on its front legs, so that you expected every moment to see it
pitching forward into the lecture-room, with the lecturer after it; and,
seizing a quill, always provided for the purpose, began at once to speak,
and to twist and twirl and tear in pieces the quill. Sometimes, in the
heat of his discourse, he would suddenly jerk up his head, whirl entirely
round with his face to the wall and his back to the audience, and then as
suddenly whirl back again, his words all the while pouring along in a
perfect torrent of involved and fervent thought. Add to this a constant
writhing and swinging of his legs, with a frequent slight spitting,
produced by a chronic weakness of the salivary glands, and you have a
picture of the outward man known in Berlin as John William Augustus
Neander; to be known in history as one of the most learned, revered and
beloved teachers of our century.

While it is indispensable to our full and lively appreciation of Neander
that these little things be known of him, no one will be so foolish as to
let such accidents and eccentricities of the outward life divert his
attention from the grand and rarely equalled manhood which lay behind and
beneath them. To give anything like a just estimate of this manhood would
be no easy task, however. His native endowments, the attainments he had
made in the learning pertaining to his department, and the part he was
called to play in the regeneration of German science and German faith,
were all remarkable. From the first glimpse we catch of him, when, at 17
years of age, he had given his head and heart to Plato, he strikes us as
no ordinary character; and our wonder deepens at every step, till at last
we behold him sinking exhausted amidst his labors, and all Christendom
gathered in sorrow around his grave.

His native instincts, tastes and sympathies were all singularly pure and
generous. His family attachments were strong. In the latest periods of his
life, when she had long been dead, the name of his mother could not be
mentioned by him without a visible gush of deep and tender emotion. The
loss of his favorite sister, some years before his own departure, almost
shattered him. For days he drooped and mourned amongst his b