erthrow of impulses setting in
other directions than the chosen movement of one's own soul!

What pleasure in the proud knowledge that all one's success is one's
own doing, and the sum of it cast up to one's credit upon the long
ledger of life! To this exhilarating self-content I can lay no claim.
For whatever measure of what is called success has fallen to my lot, I
can ask no credit. I find myself in the chastened position of one
whose literary abilities all belong to one's ancestors.

It is humbling--I do not deny that it may be morally invigorating--to
feel that whatever is "worth mentioning" in my life is no affair of
mine, but falls under the beautiful and terrible law by which the dead
men and women whose blood bounds in our being control our destinies.

Yet, with the notable exception of my father, I have less than the
usual store of personal acquaintance with the "people who most
influenced me." Of my grandfather, Moses Stuart, I have but two
recollections; and these, taken together, may not be quite devoid of
interest, as showing how the law of selection works in the mind of an
imaginative child.

I remember seeing the Professor of Sacred Literature come into his
dining-room one morning in his old house on Andover Hill which was
built for him, and marked the creation of his department in the early
days of the seminary history. He looked very tall and imposing. He had
a mug in his hand, and his face smiled like the silver of which it was
made.

The mug was full of milk, and he handed it ceremoniously to the
year-old baby, his namesake and grandson, my first brother, whose
high-chair stood at the table.

Then, I remember--it must have been a little more than a year after
that--seeing the professor in his coffin in the front hall; that he
looked taller than he did before, but still imposing; that he had his
best coat on--the one, I think, in which he preached; and that he was
the first dead person I had ever seen.

Whenever the gray-headed men who knew him used to sit about, relating
anecdotes of him--as, how many commentaries he published, or how he
introduced the first German lexicon into this country (as if a girl in
short dresses would be absorbingly interested in her grandfather's
dictionaries!)--I saw the silver mug and the coffin.

Gradually the German lexicon in a hazy condition got melted in between
them. Sometimes the baby's mug sat upon the dictionary. Sometimes the
dictionary lay upon the co