CHAPTER IV. THE FATHER OF THE MAN." HENRY WARD BEECHER began going to school when he was only four years of age. He used to walk to Ma'am Kilbourn's school with his sister Harriet, and, when there, would sit daily on the bench, kicking his heels in weary idleness and saying over the dreary letters twice a day. Still he was out of the way, and, with people as busy as the Beechers, this meant a great deal. Mrs. Stowe writes: "He was my two years junior, and nearest companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. I taught him drawing and heard his Latin lessons." He was never a promising learner of lessons, and his first school, where the hours went slowly by and where the big girls sawed off with tin shears some of his long golden curls, was not a youthful paradise. From this school he went to the district schoolhouse, where the exercises were daily readings from the Bible and the Columbian Orator, with "sums" from the Elementary Arithmetic and the practice of handwriting. The switch and the ferule were a part of the teacher's armory, but they gave no such misery as the long 1 Letter to George Eliot (" The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe," P. 475). weariness and agony of the constant effort to keep still. mer. Mr. Beecher has given a picturesque description of the district schoolhouse, the small, square pine building, blazing in the sun, with a huge pile of wood before it in the winter and piles of chips in the sumWe cannot withhold our sympathy from the boy whose restless legs kept swinging under the seat, and we can almost hear the voice of the master, when, bringing his hickory ferule down on the desk, he roars out "Silence." We hear the occasional laugh and the not infrequent slap, and we realize some of the beneficent changes which have made the schoolrooms to-day delightful to many, if not to most, of our children. Mr. Beecher tells us that he and his fellow sufferers felt thankful to every meadow-lark which came into sight, and envied the flies more than anything else, unless it were the birds which were glimpsed through the open windows. Henry's progress was not satisfactory. His backwardness was due not so much to his lack of verbal memory or to any mental dullness, as to the methods of teaching which then prevailed. He was taken to Mr. Brace's select school in Litchfield for one year, and then, when ten years of age, was sent to the school of the Rev. Mr. Langdon in the town of Bethlehem a few miles away. He remained there only a year, having acquired from his early experiences a distaste for school-life and for prescribed study. But he had splendid opportunities for roaming through field and wood, even though he made but slight progress in his books and was a wretchedly bad speller and even "cribbed " his Latin recitations. He studied Nature with a gun over his shoulder, even though he made but little advancement in learning the tongue of the military masters of the ancient world. Though he had no pleasant recollections of his earlier school-days, we find it agreeable to recall his first theological battle. At the private school in Bethlehem one of the schoolboys, older than most of them, paraded the objections to the Bible which he had drawn from the reading of Paine's "Age of Reason." But Henry Ward, believing that he was wrong, replied to him thoroughly. After making careful preparation by the study of Watson's "Apology," he challenged the big boy to a discussion, and by the acclamations of his schoolfellows he was hailed as victor in the debate. Four schools had now been tried with indifferent success. It was thought wise by his persevering parents to try also the fifth. Henry was sent to Hartford, where his oldest sister Catherine was teaching. He tarried there only six months, having gained considerable distinction as a small specimen of perpetual motion. He also won repute by his remarkable ability in giving provokingly funny or deliberately wrong answers. He returned home with the reputation of being a poor scholar, a great joker, and a boy who had much within him that might yet be developed. While the outer manifestations of his life up to this time were those of an irrepressible, effervescent and fun-loving boy, there was beneath all a poetic, yearning, and even melancholy spirit. In this respect the child was conspicuously "the father of the man." This growing, healthy, hungry, curious-minded, prankish boy, who fondly loved the good things which Nature furnished in winter and summer, found his best schooling out of doors. had great sympathy with the Lowell's lines: Throughout his life he sentiment expressed in "Merely to bask and ripen is sometimes Though dull at first to ordinary book-knowledge, the clouds and the elms, the birds and the ponds and the trout-streams found Henry a good scholar. He knew where to see the squirrels and find the sweetflag, the sassafras bushes, the chestnuts, and the hickories. His attachment to old Litchfield was mainly an attachment to what Nature showed to him there, He loved the hills and the majestic trees which the storms beat upon fiercely through the long, cold winter and gently caressed in the warm summer days. And Litchfield was a wholesome and breezy height for a strong boy's early experiences. What he saw and felt and dreamed and did was a prophecy of his own wholesome, many-sided, unconventional, and farreaching life. "His strong, tireless, responsible, magnificent physique dates its notable beginning to the air, sunshine, freedom, and healthfulness of the Litchfield hill-tops." 1 Rev. Frank S. Child's "Boyhood of Beecher," p. 29. "With the innocent abandon of childhood, he flung himself upon the bosom of Mother Nature, and drew priceless inspiration from her love-work. And seasons mattered little to the observant child of Nature. The wild storms of December made their own strange revelations to his awakened fancy. The crystal snow-flake and the glittering icicle turned him into keen inquisitor. The rough usage of the winds, when they wrestled with him amid the snowdrifts, schooled him into rugged endurance. He heard strange voices through the storms-he caught the dissolving pictures of shy faces in the frost-work. The besparkled trees of February thaw-the myriadcolored forests of October-the delicate greens of the nascent leaves in May-time-they were all cherished by this devotee of Nature, and their suggestiveness had large share in fashioning the current of his thought." But the chief facts of all life reach down to those deep verities on which religion is built. That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and yet into these early days came serious and lasting impressions. In 1817, his stepmother wrote: "Our religious privileges are very great. Church meetings are interesting, and our domestic worship very delightful. We sing a good deal, and have reading aloud as much as we can." Rev. Thomas K. Beecher records that the family prayers propagated the ancestral religion in his brother, though they failed to hand down the ancestral theology.' Henry had a 2 164 Boyhood of Beecher," p. 27. 2 44 Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," Vol. I., p. 369. "Biography," p. 91. |