You know when they are moved round in that way there are four or five steps that meet in one point, a, and branch at b, so you cannot step on them except at b. Well, I stepped down at a and fell five stairs head-first—stretching my hands forward saved my cranium—and tumbled the rest of the way, to the no small annoyance of my shins and knees. So much for running away from the levÉe.”

“Catharine and Harriet came to tea, after which I went home with them, when Harriet put her curls on to my head and her bonnet, Catharine a cloak and neck-handkerchief, and then called the young ladies in, and they all thought that I was Harriet; and then, to cap all, Harriet put on a man’s cloak and my hat, and she looked exactly like you [Charles]!”

Such was Henry Ward Beecher at the age of seventeen, on the eve of entering college—bashful, smooth-faced, and changing rapidly in appearance, so that his own sisters did not know him. The penmanship shows as yet an unformed hand, but in its main features is like that of a later date.

He carelessly leaves out a word or a letter here and there, and markedly in places continues the old habit of his early school days—poor spelling. Nothing appears that indicates any talent superior to the majority of young men on their way to college, unless it be a certain enthusiasm, straightforwardness, and simplicity.

The college at this time was but nine years old, having been established in 1821. Rev. Heman Humphrey was president. It was small and poorly endowed, as well as young, but the chairs of instruction were ably filled; and since it had been founded by the orthodox Congregationalists as, in fact, an antidote to the Unitarianism of Harvard, and with especial reference to the education of young men for the ministry, its orthodoxy was unquestioned and its religious spirit pronounced and active.

By reason of his excellent preparation and the admirable mental training he had received, either of two courses were open to Henry Ward. He might aspire to lead his class in scholarship, become a “high-honor” man, and possibly take the valedictory, or use the time which he had at his disposal in following out those studies and readings that were to his taste.

He chose the latter, and, while giving sufficient study to the college course to preserve a respectable standing in his class, gave his greatest effort to carrying out his own plan of development and culture.

“I had acquired by the Latin and mathematics the power of study,” he says. “I knew how to study, and I turned it upon things I wanted to know.”

The beauty of the Greek and Latin classics did not attract him; it seemed cold and far away, belonging to another time and another order of mind; but our English classics, with their warmth of feeling, their lofty imagination, their delicate sentiment, their power and eloquence, seemed akin and near to him; they had to do with the present, and he gave himself to their study with a whole-hearted enthusiasm that rendered him peculiarly open to their influences.

Inspired and fed by them as to what to say, he also gave especial attention to the manner of saying it. Rhetoric and oratory were diligently pursued throughout his college course. In these departments he seems, according to the testimony of his class and college mates, to have excelled then almost as markedly as he has since.

Says Dr. Thomas P. Field: “The first thing I particularly remember about him in college was this: I went into our class prayer-meeting on Saturday evening, and young Beecher gave an exhortation. He urged us to a higher life and more constant activity in religious work. I heard him a great many times after he became a famous preacher, but I think I never was more moved by his eloquence than in that boys’ prayer-meeting. In the regular routine of our studies I always was aroused and astonished by his extemporaneous debates. He surpassed all the rest of us then in extemporaneous power of speech as much as he did in his after-life. There was where he seemed to me particularly to excel as a student. In mere recitation of mathematics or languages many of us could surpass him, but in extemporaneous debates he could beat us all. I was always greatly interested, too, in his written essays. We were in the habit of reading our essays to the professors in the class-room. Your father always had something to say that was fresh and striking and out of the beaten track of thought—something, too, that he had not gotten from books, but that was the product of his own thinking.”

Dr. John Haven, another classmate, says of him: “He was a great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when he graduated.”

Says Lewis Tappan, a classmate: “In logic and class debates no one could approach him. I listened to his flow of impassioned eloquence in those my youthful days with wonder and admiration.”

S. Hopkins Emery, another classmate, in answer to a letter, writes: “Nobody could be gloomy or desponding near your father. He made us all cheerful and happy. Do I remember him in college? Indeed I do—more than I have time to write or you patience, perhaps, to read. It seems but yesterday that I was reading a composition in the lecture-room of Professor Worcester. Beecher sat just behind me. I had finished reading, when I heard a friendly whisper in my ear: ‘Emery, your porch is too large for the house.’ It was a good criticism. In such college studies which had to do with writing and speaking the English language your father excelled. The dead languages and mathematics never seemed to suit his taste. He might have excelled in them if he had been so minded. He was equal to anything he undertook. No one was his match in extemporaneous talk or debate.”

This power and its exercise upon one memorable occasion was fraught, according to a college mate, Rev. S. W. Hanks, with very marked consequences:

“In the annual Sophomore and Freshman fray the former found themselves engaged with a force that was more than a match for them, and their pranks upon the Freshmen got repaid with much more than the usual interest. In consequence of this a meeting of all the classes in college was held to protest against the barbarities of this customary war, in which the smoke of the battle usually found its way into the Freshmen’s rooms. At this meeting a leading member of the Junior class, finding the Sophomores a little wanting in courage and speaking talent, volunteered to act as their attorney, and made a telling and crushing speech against the Freshmen class for their hard handling of the Sophomores, who had only followed an old custom in their treatment of the Freshmen. At the close of this speech by the ‘leading Junior,’ Beecher arose and said he wished to say a word on the other side, whereupon he ‘went for’ the Junior in a speech full of wit and point, which altogether ‘turned the tables’ to the great amusement of all present and the great annoyance of the ‘leading Junior.’ When the meeting broke up the Goliah of the Junior class found himself suffering from a wound which the little smooth stone from the sling of the hitherto unknown Freshman had made. This was a new experience for the proud Junior, and the wound rankled.

“It seems never to have been forgotten. Time passed on and the ‘leading Junior’ became a leading lawyer, jurist, judge, and Democratic politician, and when the great scandal arose volunteered a very strong argument against Mr. Beecher. It had great weight in some quarters, but was less convincing to those parties who remembered that this judge was eagerly embracing the first opportunity that had offered of paying off an old score of their college days.”

“He was whole-souled and hearty, humorous in the extreme but without a particle of viciousness, a reformer and an earnest man.” This is again the testimony of his classmate, Dr. Field.

“We would often gather on the steps of the chapel, a number of us incidentally, and if your father was in the gathering we always had much wit and sparkling repartee, and anecdote and description, all of which seemed to be infused by your father, and of which, indeed, he was the greater part. He always seemed full of health and hilarity, and yet, after all, there was a prevailing seriousness, an earnest purpose, a determination to be a good and true man. I never knew anything of him but what was good, and great, and orderly, and becoming a Christian. I have heard persons say he was wild in college. Nothing more untrue. I never heard him utter a word, and never heard of his doing a deed, that was contrary to the rules of morality and propriety. He would criticise some things in college studies, etc. I remember his maintaining very decidedly that the study of mathematics was not a good discipline for the mind, but he never set himself against college rules of order. He was a strong temperance man, and was very bold to rebuke his fellow-students in anything he thought to be wrong.”

Of his social and humorous qualities Mrs. Stowe says:

“In fact, Mr. Beecher was generally the centre of a circle of tempestuous merriment, ever eddying round him in one droll form or another.

“He was quick in repartee, an excellent mimic, and his stories would set the gravest in a roar. He had the art, when admonished by graver people, of somehow entrapping them into more uproarious laughing than he himself practised, and then looking innocently surprised.

“Mr. Beecher on one occasion was informed that the head tutor of the class was about to make him a grave exhortatory visit. The tutor was almost seven feet high, and as solemn as an Alpine forest. But Mr. Beecher knew that, like most solemn Yankees, he was at heart a deplorable wag, a mere whited sepulchre of conscientious gravity, with measureless depths of unrenewed chuckle hid away in the depths of his heart. When apprised of his approach he suddenly whisked away into his closet the chairs of his room, leaving only a low one which had been sawed off at the second joint, so that it stood about a foot from the floor. Then he crawled through the hole in that study-table which he had made after a peculiar plan of his own, and, seated meekly among his books, awaited the visit.

“A grave rap is heard. ‘Come in.’ Far up in the air the solemn dark face appears. Mr. Beecher rose ingenuously and offered to come out. ‘No, never mind,’ says the visitor; ‘I just came to have a little conversation with you. Don’t move.’

“‘Oh!’ says Beecher innocently, ‘pray sit down, sir,’ indicating the only chair.

“The tutor looked apprehensively, but began the process of sitting down. He went down, down, down, but still no solid ground being gained, straightened himself up and looked uneasy.

“‘I don’t know but that chair is too low for you; do let me get you another,’ said Beecher meekly.

“‘Oh! no, my young friend, don’t rise, don’t trouble yourself; it is perfectly agreeable to me; in fact, I like a low seat.’ And with these words the tall man doubled up like a jack-knife, and was seen sitting with his grave face between his knees, like a grasshopper drawn up for a spring. He heaved a deep sigh and his eyes met the eyes of Mr. Beecher; the hidden spark of native depravity within him was exploded by one glance at those merry eyes, and he burst into a loud roar of merriment, which the two continued for some time, greatly to the amusement of the boys who were watching to hear how Beecher would come out with his lecture. The chair was known thereafter as the ‘Tutor’s Delight.’”

He carried his usual sports with him into college life. “On Saturday afternoons,” says Lewis Tappan, “we often revisited the woods in the rear of our former home, on which occasion your father would climb the tallest trees and place a pillow-case over the holes where the flying squirrels were. I on the ground rapped the trees, startling the inmates, who were caught in their efforts to escape.

“Botanical and geological specimens were collected on the way, and in his room your father had a good collection of the latter.”

He joined a club of eight who boarded a mile from college, that the going and returning for their meals might give them six miles of exercise a day. This was done in part to save expense, the board being cheaper at that distance from the village. He also walked from college to Boston, more than a hundred miles, on his vacations, for the same reason. Yet, with all his care in economy, and although his board cost him but $1.50 a week, it was thought at one time impossible to keep him in college on account of the expense, as this letter, written by a friend of the family during his Freshman year, will explain:

“While Henry and Charles were in college your father and mother felt very much straitened for money. One evening particularly they were talking about it, and did not know what they should do to keep the boys along. At last your father said: ‘Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am sure he always will.’ The mother lay awake, she told me afterwards, and cried. She cried because she did not see how they should get along; but what most troubled her was that her husband had so much faith and she had not any.

“The next morning was Sabbath morning. Some one rang at the door, and a letter was handed in containing a $100 bill and no name. They came up to tell me, as they always did, but they did not know, nor I then, who gave it. I found out afterwards it was Mr. Homes—a thank-offering at the conversion of one of his children.“

The following letter, written near the close of his Freshman year, shows the bent of his mind at this period:

Lest we get a stronger impression of his sanctity at this time than the facts would warrant, we add this incident, related by himself, of one of his vacation experiences in Boston that has in it a very decided flavor of humorous and unsanctified humanity: “Looking for a friend, I rapped at the door where I thought he lived. The door stuck, but at last flew open after a good deal of tugging from the other side, and a very red-faced woman appeared and asked in a very cross tone what I wanted. ‘Does Mr. ——— live here?’ I asked very meekly. ‘No, he don’t!’ snapped the woman, and slammed the door in my face. I thought I would teach her a lesson; so, after I had walked a little ways to give her time to get to work, I went back and rapped again as if I wanted to tear the knocker off. And when the same woman opened the door I shouted at the top of my voice, ‘Who said he did?’ and then turned and walked away. When I reached the corner the woman was still gazing after me in amazed silence.”

It was at Amherst that young Beecher began his anti-slavery career, as he tells us in his sermon upon the death of Wendell Phillips:

“Fifty years ago, during my college life, I was chosen by the Athenian Society to debate the question of African colonization, which then was new, fresh, and enthusiastic.... Fortunately I was assigned to the negative side of the question, and in preparing to speak I prepared my whole life. I contended against colonization as a condition of emancipation—enforced colonization was but little better than enforced slavery—and advocated immediate emancipation on the broad ground of human rights. I knew but very little then, but I knew this, that all men are designed of God to be free, a fact which ought to be the text of every man’s life—this sacredness of humanity as given of God, redeemed from animalism by Jesus Christ, crowned and clothed with rights that no law nor oppression should dare touch.”

Of his religious life at this period we give the story in his own words:

“When I went to college there was a revival there, in which I was prodigiously waked up. I was then about seventeen years old, and I had begun to pass from boyhood to manhood, but I was yet in an unsettled state of mind. I had no firm religious ground to stand upon. I was beginning to slough hereditary influences without being able to take on more salutary influences, and I went through another phase of suffering which was far worse than any that I had previously experienced. It seemed as though all the darknesses of my childhood were mere puffs to the blackness which I was now passing through. My feeling was such that if dragging myself on my belly through the street had promised any chance of resulting in good I would have done it. No man was so mean that I was not willing to ask him to pray for me. There was no humiliation that I would not have submitted to ten thousand times over if thereby I could have found relief from the doubt, perplexity, and fear which tormented me.

“I went to Dr. Humphrey in my darkness of soul and said: ‘I am without hope and am utterly wretched, and I want to be a Christian.’ He sat and looked with great compassion upon me (for he was one of the best men on earth; if there is a saint in heaven Dr. Humphrey is one), and said: ‘Ah! it is the Spirit of God, my young man; and when the Spirit of God is at work with a soul I dare not interfere.’ And I went away in blacker darkness than I came, if possible.

“I went to an inquiry-meeting which Professor Hitchcock was conducting, and when he saw me there he said: ‘My friends, I am so overwhelmed with the consciousness of God’s presence in this room that I cannot speak a word.’ And he stopped talking, and I got up and went out without obtaining rescue or help.

“Then I resorted to prayer, and frequently prayed all night—or should have done so if I had not gone to sleep; I tried a great many devices; I strove with terrific earnestness and tremendous strength; and I remember that one night, when I knelt before the fire where I had been studying and praying, there came the thought to my mind: ‘Will God permit the devil to have charge of one of his children that does not want to be deceived?’ and in an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh; and, feeling that I must tell somebody what the Lord had done for me, I went and told Dr. Humphrey and others.

“I endeavored, from that time out, to help those who were in trouble of mind like that in which I had been whelmed; and yet I was in a sort of half-despair.”

It was in one of these half-despairing moods, doubtless, that he sought counsel from Moody Harrington, of whose piety and wisdom in directing inquirers he has often spoken. Harrington’s room-mate writes:

“It was in the midst of this great religious movement that one day Henry Ward Beecher came to our room—how distinctly I remember it!—and, with a countenance betokening a mighty pressure upon his spirit, said substantially: ‘Harrington, I am in great distress, in spiritual darkness; I don’t think I have any religion. I’ve come to talk with you.’ My room-mate took him into his bedroom and talked and prayed with him a long time, and when the young man came out from that interview his face seemed radiant with hope and peace. Years after Beecher had become famous he would repeatedly speak of Harrington as having been to him a spiritual helper beyond that of any other man he had known.”

His first talk in a religious meeting outside the school or college is thus described:

“I think it must have been late in my Freshman career at Amherst College or in my Sophomore. My mind was much stirred and distressed at that time on the subject of religion. In the class above, one Moody Harrington took much interest in me. He was in some respects a remarkable man for profound religious feeling, for fervid imagination, and for remarkable eloquence in exhortation. He lifted me by his personal sympathy and his encouragement out of great despondency and set me on my feet with some tremblings of heart. On one occasion he asked me to walk with him one evening to Logtown to a little prayer and conference meeting. After Harrington had spoken for a while he turned to me all unexpectedly and asked me to make some remarks. I was confounded. I rose and said something—I do not know what, nor did I quite know then, for everything was whirling darkness while I was speaking, but it was the letting out of waters. I never ride past the Dwight house without going out of the cars to look over the place and to bring back to memory that dismal night, and that dismal speech, and the dismal walk back to college, ashamed and silent.”

Another important event took place in his Sophomore year, January 2, 1832. He became engaged to Eunice White Bullard, daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard, of West Sutton, Mass. Of this event, the preceding and succeeding acquaintance, our dear mother has written in a paper entitled “Looking Back,” of which she says: “Of course all this is no help to you in preparing your father’s life, but I sit and dream of the past and write just as it rises before me, as fresh as if but yesterday, hoping by doing so something may come to me that will be of service to you.”

We shall give her notes just as she has written them, leaving it for our readers to judge whether or not they are of any service:

Somewhere Father Beecher has described a “Saxon courtship” as “a grave and serious thing. It is a matter of consideration. I have known a proposal of love to be stated like a proposition, and calmly argued for and against with far less warmth than Luther would have felt in debating a thesis. Indeed, many courtships are like attempts at kindling fires with green wood—a few starveling coals are heaped together, a mere spark dances in and out upon the inhospitable charcoal, and disappears on one side as fast as it appears on the other. But by all manner of shavings and bits of paper—mere trinkets, as it were, and billet-doux—a slight flame is got up, which strives, with doubtful prospect, to convert the smoke into blaze. The bellows are called in, the fire is fairly driven up to its work, the green sticks begin to sizzle at either end; and though at last, when the heat triumphs, the fire is large and lasting, the poor fellow that kindled it had to work for it.”

Now, we never could bring ourselves to asking direct questions, and we do not suppose that we should ever have been any wiser if we had; but, from the references sometimes made to riding through covered bridges, from the comical look that would come to his face and the blushes that would be sure to come to her cheeks when the raillery around the table became hot and personal, we were led to believe that this was not their kind.

On two leaves of his diary, written probably while at his home in Boston in the vacation that followed his Freshman year, and during the summer in which he had made the acquaintance of Miss Bullard, we find the following:

“Sept. 3, 1831, Sab. morn.—I found the correspondence of my father and own mother this morning, and eagerly sought out her letters and read them. O my mother! I could not help kissing the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that her hand had rested upon it while writing it. The hand of my mother! She had formed every letter which I saw. She had looked upon that paper which I now looked upon. She had folded it. She had sent it. But I found out more of her mind than I ever knew before; more of her feelings, her piety. I should think from her writings that she was very amiable, lovely, and confiding in her disposition, yet had much dignity. She appeared to have a mind very clear, strong, yet not perceptible till brought out by her feelings. Her letter to father in which she treats of ‘love to God, whether we should love him because he has done us good or not,’ etc., I was much pleased with. And I could not help observing that her letters were superior, more refined and conclusive, than the corresponding ones of father’s. They corresponded upon subjects, it seems, as pride, dress, slander, etc., etc. Her piety was doubted by herself, although no one who reads her description of her feelings can doubt for a moment that Christ was found within her heart.

“The letter to father in reply, apparently, to one in which he had expressed his feelings toward her and urged for her permission to hope for a future union, pleased me much. There was much playfulness about it. I thought that I could see that she loved him while she was writing it, yet she tried not exactly to show it. I should think that at the conclusion she told her feelings frankly, from one line which I saw, but the rest was torn off. I suspect that father did it that no one might ever see it.”

In common with many other students of limited means, he taught a term of eight weeks during three of the four years of his college course, using the winter vacation, which was at first six weeks long, and borrowing two weeks from the winter term in college.

Of his experience in Hopkinton and some other matters, especially the fear of his friends concerning his engagement, the following letter to his brother William gives some interesting details:

”My dear Brother:

“... I know not as you would have had a reply at all if it were not for something said on the first page. Now, I supposed that my good friends would find out all at once that my engagement had undermined all my habits of study and was ruining me, nor did it surprise me to have you write it. It is all false, as false as it can be. No term since I have been in college have I studied so much as the last term; no year accomplished so much as the last. I am not anxious, however, to vindicate myself; I am ready to have you all think so, if needful, for I expected it from the first.

“Soon after I began the school some of the boys began to be fractious—all of them larger and stronger than myself. Their parents set them on, and they determined to carry me out of the room. A large fellow disobeyed me before the whole school, and persisted in it. They hoped I would thrash him, and then they would rise. But I turned him out of the school forthwith. He came the next day. I had previously told the committee and asked them to take the business out of my hands. They approved, but said that they wished I would do it. The next day I saw that they had got another great fellow in to help them. I called two of the committee in, and then ordered this disobedient boy out. He refused, and I took a rule and beat him, and finally broke it over his head. He struck at me a number of times and I parried them. The large ones then rose. I seized a club of wood and struck the boy three times—tore the skin each blow. The committee had to take the other fellows to keep them off. I then dismissed the school; told the committee that I should not keep the school where I could have them stand by and see such a scene without doing something; that if they would see those fellows removed I would go on, if not I would not. They said that they would do it if they thought they had power. I settled it all very soon by saying that I would not keep the school, and set my face as though I would return to Amherst. But the next day, Saturday, it rained. The committee liked my school, and gave me a good dismission in writing. The scholars were pleased for the most part, and through them their parents. They wished me much to open a private school. I waited till I found they were in earnest, and then opened one, and now am comfortably teaching about thirty scholars. Besides this my time is loaded. Sunday noon, Sabbath-school; Sunday afternoon, five o’clock, I have a Bible-class of ladies; Wednesday and Saturday evenings, meetings in the centre of town; two other evenings in the districts, and, after this, Sunday evening in the vestry.... May God bless and prosper you.