some great argument, whose vast proportions will in due time be
developed, like the uncovering of a colossus. Beware, Mr. Solomon
Williams of Hatfield, and you, Chubb and Tyndal, and John Taylor of
Norwich, for you will each and all of you find your master in this
secluded parson. Thirteen hours per day are given to study, and this has
been the average for years.
And _such_ study to create realities out of the fogs of metaphysics, and
to span the concrete and the abstract with a bridge such as Milton threw
across space. This man can spend hours in pursuit of 'volitions' with
all the excitement of the chamois-hunt. Now his eye brightens, for he
has transfixed an idea, and holds it up in all the nicety of artistic
touch, while he dissects it to its ramifications. It is all _con amore_
with him, though his readers will need a clue to the maze of intricate
reasoning.
One can not pass through the streets of Northampton, so broad, so rural,
and so picturesque, without being overshadowed by that memory, which may
be expressed in the sweet lines of Longfellow,--
'Here in patience and in sorrow, laboring still with busy hand,
Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the better land.'
It is gratifying to know that his memory is honored in Northampton by
the naming of a church, though all may not understand the connection.
The old 'meeting-house' (for the Puritans used the word church only in a
spiritual sense) stood fronting the site of the present enormous
edifice. It was torn down in 1812. Here for nearly a quarter of a
century the tall form, and face pale and meagre from intense thinking,
appeared each Sabbath before a people among whom his recluse habits
rendered him almost a stranger. Here, having rested upon the desk, upon
the elbow of his left arm, whose hand held a tiny book of closely
written MS., he read with stooping form and low tones those solemn
arguments and tremendous appeals which now thrill us from the printed
page. Each of those tiny books was a sermon. Many of these are still
preserved, and Dr. Tryon Edwards, of New London, has a chest filled with
these memorials of his great ancestor. They are written in so fine a
hand as to be hardly legible except to one practiced in their
deciphering--a result of the extreme economy of one who, with all
carefulness, was the largest consumer of paper and ink in New England.
Solemn as was the deportment of this reverend man, sundry practical
jokes at his expens
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