"The most brilliant and fertile pulpit-genius of the nineteenth century, and the most widely influential American of his time," says John Henry Barrows in his masterly life of Henry Ward Beecher. "To the sensitive heart of a woman, he added a lion-like courage, and a Miltonic loftiness of spirit. To the more than royal imagination of Jeremy Taylor, he added a zeal as warm as Whitefield's. In him the wit of Sydney Smith was combined with the common-sense of John Bunyan.

"In the annals of oratory his place is near that of Demosthenes. Among reformers he need fear no comparison with Wendell Phillips, John Bright, Mazzini, or Charles Sumner. In moral genius for statesmanship he was the brother of Abraham Lincoln; and, in the annals of the pulpit, he can only be mentioned with the greatest names,—Chrysostom, Bernard, Luther, Wesley, Chalmers, Spurgeon."

Dr. Mark Hopkins, in Edward W. Bok's "Memorial Volume," said of Henry Ward Beecher's forty years in Plymouth pulpit, "No such instance of prolonged, steady power at one point, in connection with other labors so extended and diversified, and magnificent in their results, has ever been known."

Dr. Thomas Armitage of the Fifth-avenue Baptist Church, New York, his life-long friend, gave Beecher "the first place among the preachers of the world to-day." Dr. Robert Collyer said, "To my mind, he was the greatest preacher on this planet.... Men will be his debtors for ages to come."

June 24, 1891, the statue of this great American leader, by John Quincy Adams Ward, was unveiled in front of Brooklyn City Hall. Three hundred children from Plymouth Church Sunday-school sang his favorite hymn,—

accompanied by the band of the Thirteenth Regiment.

Henry Ward Beecher, the son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote, was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813. The father was an eloquent, fearless, great-hearted man, the son and grandson of a sturdy blacksmith; the mother a refined, dignified, intellectual, beautiful, and superior woman. Her family connections were of the best in New England. Her ancestor, James Foote, an English officer, aided Charles II. of England to hide himself in the Royal Oak which grew in a field of clover, and for this was knighted; the family coat-of-arms bearing an oak for its crest with a clover-leaf in its quarterings.

Roxana, the granddaughter of General Ward of Revolutionary fame, was remarkably well educated for the times. She was versed in literature and history, which she studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff,—no wonder that her great son was an omniverous reader,—she wrote and spoke the French language fluently, drew with the pencil, and painted with the brush on ivory, sang and played on the guitar, and was an expert with her needle.

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

After her marriage with Mr. Beecher, she opened a school for girls in their parish at East Hampton, Long Island, to eke out a living on their four hundred dollars salary. From here they were called in 1810, eleven years after their marriage, to the hilly, lonely town of Litchfield, Conn., bringing their six little children with them.

Henry Ward was the ninth child, the eighth then living.

So many cares and privations broke down the beautiful mother, who died when Henry was three years old.

A friend of the family writes: "She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness prayed for life. She dedicated her sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that her children might be trained up for God....

"She attempted to speak to her children; but she was extremely exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done or could do, and that they must trust him."

After Lyman Beecher had prayed, "she fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a moving scene to see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother."

"They told us," says Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine's window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered, 'Why, I am going to heaven to find ma!'"

The benign influence of this lovely mother was never forgotten by Henry Ward Beecher. He said: "I have only such a remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago, faint, evanescent, and yet, caught by imagination and fed by that which I have heard of her, and by what my father's thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember.... Do you know why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her....

"She has been part and parcel of my upper life—a star whose parallax I could not take, but nevertheless, shining from afar, she has been the light that lit me easier into the thought of the invisible and the presence of the Divine."

Again her distinguished son wrote: "There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God."

When Henry Ward was eighteen, he found some letters of his mother to his father. He wrote in his diary: "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."

The Rev. Lyman Beecher said of her, "I never heard a murmur, ... I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it."

Henry Ward repeats this incident told him by his father: "One day, being much annoyed by some hogs that kept getting into his garden, he seized his gun and rushed to the door. My mother anxiously followed, and cried, 'O father, don't shoot the poor things!' He flashed back at her, 'Woman, go into the house!' and when he was telling me of it years afterwards he said: 'Without a word or look she turned, quietly, majestically, and went in—but she didn't get in before I did. I threw my arms around her in an agony of self-reproach, and cried "Forgive me, oh, forgive me!" She uttered no word, but she looked at me like a queen—and smiled—and kissed my face; my passion was gone, and my offence forgiven.' Up to the last of his life he never spoke of her but with intensest admiration and loving remembrance."

About a year after Roxana's death, Dr. Lyman Beecher found an estimable woman willing to be a mother to the eight motherless children, and to take summer boarders to help support the family, whose income was eight hundred dollars a year. She must have been a woman of great self-sacrifice.

Young Henry thought her saintly, but cold. "Although I was longing to love somebody," he writes, "she did not call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who was very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her.... I knew that about twilight she prayed; and I had a great shrinking from going past her door at the time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had set her affections on things above, and not on things beneath."

At four years of age Henry went to Ma'am Kilbourn's school, where he repeated his letters twice a day, and later to the district school, for which he had in those days no affection. "In winter," he says, "we were squeezed into the recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent to school to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys. We were read and spelt twice a day, unless something happened to prevent, which did happen about every other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still.

"And a time we always had of it. Our shoes always would be scraping on the floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being educated. All our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our breasts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere else; and then with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of stillness, he would cry, 'Silence in that corner!' ...

"Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great iron box stove, red-hot." Those of us who have attended district schools in New England will recognize the truthfulness of the picture.

Henry longed for birds and flowers and books, as indeed he did all through college, and was ever a deeper student of nature than of books. And yet in after years he was glad for some of these school experiences. "I am thankful," he says, "that I learned to hem towels—as I did. I know how to knit suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about working in wood-sawing, chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that sort. I was brought up to put my hand to anything; so that when I went West, and was travelling on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road where there was an abandoned blacksmith's shop, I could go in and start the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What man has done man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up boys so that they shall think they can do anything. I could do anything."

The lad was sensitive to praise or blame, and extremely diffident. "To walk into a room where 'company' was assembled, and to do it erect and naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly.... Our backbone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known something of pain in after years, but few pangs have been more acute than some sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years."

Mr. Beecher felt all through his life that he owed much to a colored man, Charles Smith, who worked on his father's farm when he was a boy. "He used to lie upon his humble bed," says Mr. Beecher, "(I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room.... I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God.... He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father's family."

Henry was taken to Bethlehem, seven miles from Litchfield, to the school of the Rev. Mr. Langdon; but he seems here also to have loved the woods and flowers so much better than books, that he was finally sent to Hartford to the care of his sister Catherine, who taught a school for young ladies. Though a favorite on account of his sunny disposition, he proved a poor scholar, and was sent home at the end of six months. When the boy was thirteen, Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Boston, having been called to the pastorate of the Hanover-street Congregational Church at the North End.

Here he loved Christ Church chimes, listened to their music "with a pleasure and amazement," he says, "which I fear nothing will ever give me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous things in the New Jerusalem," and studied ships as he strolled along the docks, or lingered in Charlestown Navy Yard.

At the latter place he stole a six-pound shot, and not knowing how to get it home unobserved, carried it rolled in a handkerchief on the top of his head under his hat. With the greatest difficulty he brought it home, and then did not know what to do with it, not daring to show it, nor tell where he got it.

"But after all," he says, "that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole; and it gave me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has made my whole life happier."

The boy who had so loved the country among the hills of Connecticut, became gloomy and restless shut in by the treeless city. His father gave him the lives of Nelson and Captain Cook to read, and the lad resolved to go to sea. He could not bring himself to run away without telling his father, which he did. With rare tact Dr. Beecher replied that Henry would not wish to be an ordinary sailor.

"No," said the boy. "I want to be a midshipman, and after that a commodore."

"I see," said the father; "and in order for that you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation.... I will send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and there you'll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment."

At fourteen the lad entered Mount Pleasant Institute, the father hoping and praying that his boy "would be in the ministry yet."

With Lord Nelson and other great commanders in mind, he determined to master his studies and be somebody. Hard mathematics became easier, and he liked the drill in elocution. He enjoyed sport among the boys, and the semi-military methods of the school, but best of all he liked spending his play-hours in caring for beds of pansies and asters.

During a revival at Mount Pleasant, Henry was much moved, and wrote to his father, who advised his coming home to join the church. He did so, though he felt afterwards that the change in his life was not as thorough as he could have wished. However, it obliterated the desire of being a sailor, and turned his thoughts toward the ministry.

When he was seventeen, in 1830, he entered Amherst College. The great beauty of the scenery always had for him an especial charm. "I used to look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the blue mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and my eyes filled with tears."

In college he was fond of athletic sports, ready in wit, beginning to show his eloquence in debate, an ardent temperance advocate, a lover of rhetoric, botany, and geology, and a warm friend to his classmates. He cared little for the classics; but he read much, especially the old English authors, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others.

Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock, who was at Amherst with young Beecher, says, "He was by all odds the best debater of his college generation. I should be glad to know how he acquired his mastery of the English language.... The four books which probably helped him most were the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"

"He was," said Dr. John Haven, a classmate, "a great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when he graduated."

He necessarily used the greatest economy in college, his board costing him but one dollar and fifty cents a week, a mile from college grounds; and when vacation came he walked more than a hundred miles to Boston, because he had no money to pay the stage-coach fare.

Charles Beecher, the youngest of Roxana's children, was in college with his brother Henry. Dr. Beecher became so straitened in money matters that it seemed probable that the sons must leave college. He and his wife talked the matter over till finally he said, "Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am sure he always will." The mother lay awake after she had gone to bed, and cried over it; evidently she was not as cold at heart as the young Henry Ward thought.

The next morning was the Sabbath. The door-bell rang, and a one hundred dollar bill was handed in from Mr. Homes, as a thank-offering for the conversion of one of his children. The way was now opened for the boys to continue their college course.

After Henry had been at Amherst less than a year, in the spring vacation of 1831, he and another student walked fifty miles to the home of a classmate, and there fell in love with the sister of the latter, Eunice White Bullard, daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard of West Sutton, Mass.

"After our outside work was done," writes Mrs. Beecher, years later, "mother and I took knitting and sewing and sat down with them. I was going to wind a skein of sewing-silk (that was before spools were common), and, as was my custom, put it over the back of a chair. More gallant and thoughtful, apparently, than his older companions, this young gentleman insisted upon holding it for me to wind. For some reason—perfectly unaccountable, if one judged only by his quiet, innocent face, without watching the eyes and mouth—that skein became as intricately tangled as if tied by Macbeth's witches.

"'A badly tangled skein is it not?' said he, when I had lost half my evening in getting it wound.

"'Rather more troublesome, I imagine, than if I had kept it on the chair,' I replied. 'It was a good trial of patience, anyhow,' was his response to the laugh that followed."

The students remained for several days, and had a merry time. One day, after some pies had been taken out of the old-fashioned brick oven, a few ashes falling upon one, the mother asked Eunice to get them off. Henry offered to help, and respectfully taking the pie from her hands carried it into the garden, where he and his two other college friends ate it up. "There, we have cleared the plate nicely," said Henry Ward, as he handed it back to the mother.

Dr. Bullard said of young Beecher, "He's smart. If he lives, he'll make his mark in the world."

The next winter, January, 1832, Henry Ward taught school near the town where Eunice was teaching. He asked, "If she would go to the West with him as a missionary?" and was referred to her parents. Mrs. Bullard was grieved; but Dr. Bullard was angry, and said, "Why, you are a couple of babies. You don't know your own minds yet, and won't for some years to come." Young Beecher was a little over eighteen, and Miss Bullard ten months older.

About this time Henry earned five dollars for giving a temperance lecture, using the money to buy for his future wife the unusual love-gift of Baxter's "Saints' Rest."

Soon after, he walked to Brattleborough, Vt., fifty miles each way, gave a lecture, for which he received ten dollars, and with a part of the money bought an engagement-ring for Miss Bullard, which was also her wedding-ring, and with the rest the works of Edmund Burke.

This money gave him great satisfaction. "Oh, that bill!" he says. "How it warmed me and invigorated me! I looked at it before going to sleep; I examined my pocket the next morning, to be sure that I had not dreamed it. How I pitied the poor students, who had not, I well knew, ten dollars in their pockets. Still, I tried to keep down pride in its offensive forms. I would not be lifted up."

After he had bought the books, he says, "I was a man that owned a library! I became conservative and frugal. Before, I had spent at least a dollar and a half a year for knickknacks; but, after I had founded a library, I reformed all such wastes, and every penny I could raise or save I compelled to transform itself into books!" When he graduated, he owned about fifty volumes.

Dr. Lyman Beecher having left Boston to become the President of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Henry and Charles went thither to study theology. The three years spent there were full of pathetic, and sometimes comic, incidents. In this, at that time far West, the fences were poor, and cattle were apt to stray at will over flower-beds and across the gardens. One day Henry found a strange cow lying down on the barn floor. He quickly drove her out, chased her down the street, and, hot and tired, came to the house and threw himself on the sofa.

"There, I guess I have taught one old cow to know where she belongs," he remarked to his father.

"What do you mean?" said the doctor, growing excited. "Well, you have done it. I have just bought that cow, and had to wade the Ohio River twice to get her home; and, after I have got her safely into the barn, you have turned her out. You have done it, and no mistake." And the cow was vigorously hunted up.

During all these years affectionate letters were sent to Eunice Bullard. "What a noble creation E—— is," young Beecher writes in his journal. "I could have looked through ten thousand and never found one so every way suited to me. How dearly do I love her!"

Some of this time was darkened by doubt and disbelief; but, like John Bunyan, after about two years of unsettled condition of mind, peace was assured. "It came to me," he says, "like the bursting of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners,—not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better,—because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me.... Never for a single moment have I doubted the power of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have doubted the existence in the heaven of the sun by day and the moon by night."

The second Mrs. Beecher had died, triumphing in her faith. Dr. Beecher, tried for heresy, was fighting theological battles, which his son Henry learned to abhor.

"I see no benefit in a controversy," he wrote. "It will be a fierce technical dispute about propositions, at the expense in the churches of vital godliness.... Others may blow the bellows, and turn the doctrines in the fire, and lay them on the anvil of controversy, and beat them with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes; but I shall busy myself with using the sword of the Lord, not in forging it."

Pro-slavery riots had begun, and the printing-press of James G. Birney was destroyed by a mob of Kentucky slaveholders. Young Beecher was sworn in as a special constable, and for several nights, well armed, patrolled the streets with others, to protect the colored people. He was learning bravery early, and he had need of it through life.

Mr. Beecher graduated in 1837 from Lane Seminary, and through the influence of a Yankee woman, Martha Sawyer, was asked to go to Lawrenceburg, Ind., to preach. "There was a church in that place," says Mr. Beecher, "composed of about twenty members, of which she was the factotum. She collected the money, she was the treasurer, she was the manager, she was the trustee, she was the everything of that church."

There were about fifteen hundred persons in the little town, situated at the junction of the Ohio and Miami Rivers. There were four big distilleries in the place, and a steamboat load of liquor was carried away from it every day.

"When I went there and entered upon my vocation of preaching," says Mr. Beecher, "I found a church, occupying a little brick building, with nineteen or twenty members. There was one man, and the rest were women. With the exception of two persons, there was not one of them who was not obliged to gain a livelihood by the labor of the hands. So you will understand how very poor they were....

"I was sexton in the church. There were no lamps there, so I went and bought some and filled them and lit them. I swept the church, and lighted my own fires. I did not ring the bell because there was none. I opened the church before every meeting, and shut and locked it after every meeting. I took care of everything in the church."

The salary was to be $300—it was raised from $250—of which the Home Missionary Society was to give $150.

His friends in Cincinnati opposed his going to so small a field; but he carried out the advice which he gave years afterward to theological students: "Don't hang round idle, waiting for a good offer. Enter the first field God opens for you. If he needs you in a larger one, he will open the gate for you to enter."

Young Beecher, having waited nearly seven years to claim his bride,—he was now but twenty-four,—wrote to Miss Bullard that he would be ready for the marriage Aug. 3. Arriving at her home on the evening of July 29, he picked over and stoned with her the raisins for the wedding-cake, beat the eggs, and in every way helped on the joyful event. At the hour chosen for the ceremony, a heavy thunder-storm came on. The bride determined to wait; and an hour after the appointed time, under a brilliant rainbow, they were married, and started for their missionary labors in the West.

They boarded for a short time, and then decided to go to housekeeping. Mrs. Beecher, during the absence of her husband at a synodical meeting, found two rooms over a stable, at a rental of forty dollars per year. She went to Cincinnati by boat, to the home of the Beechers, and received, to help in furnishing these rooms, a bedstead, a stove, some sheets and pillow-cases, and a piece of carpet. Through the sale of her cloak for thirty dollars, she obtained a husk mattress, a table, wash-tubs, and groceries.

On Mr. Beecher's return he helped scrub the floors—the landlord objected to their being painted, as it would injure the wood!

Mrs. Beecher found in the back yard a broken table and shelves, which had been thrown away as useless; and covering the former with the skirts of Mr. Beecher's old coat, it became quite an elegant writing-table for the young minister. The flour-barrel and sugar-barrel—sent in by friends—were curtained from the rest of the room by a piece of four-cent calico.

Mrs. Beecher helped support the family by taking in sewing and keeping boarders. Mr. Beecher soon became the idol of his people. Mr. John R. Howard, in his life of Beecher, repeats these words of the famous preacher: "There lived over on the other side of the street in Lawrenceburg, a very profane man who was counted ugly. I understood that he had said some very bitter things of me. I went right over to his store, and sat down on the counter to talk with him. I happened in often—day in and day out. My errand was to make him like me. I did make him like me,—and all the children too; and when I left, two or three years later, it was his house that was opened to me and all my family for the week after I gave up my room. And to the day of his death, I do not believe the old man could mention my name without crying."

"Once," says a brother minister, "he called to a poor German emigrant woman that if she would bring him her clothes-line, he would show her how to get her winter's supply of fuel. She brought it, and he tied a stone to one end, and flinging it out from the shore over the logs, would draw them in. In a little while their combined efforts had brought in a dray-load."

Mr. Beecher began his work modestly: "I never expected that I could accomplish much," he said. "I merely went to work with the feeling: 'I will do as well as I can, and I will stick to it, if the Lord pleases, and fight his battle the best way I know how.' And I was thankful as I could be. Nobody ever sent me a spare-rib that I did not thank God for the kindness which was shown me. I recollect when Judge —— gave me his cast-off clothing, I felt that I was sumptuously clothed. I wore old coats and second-hand shirts for two or three years, and I was not above it, either, although sometimes, as I was physically a somewhat well-developed man, and the judge was thin and his legs were slim, they were rather a tight fit."

"At first," he says, "I preached some theology.... But my horizon grew larger and larger in that one idea of Christ.... After I had gone through two or three revivals of religion, when I looked around, he was all in all. And my whole ministry sprang out of that."

After two years at Lawrenceburg, Mr. Beecher was called to the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, then a place of four thousand inhabitants, with a salary of six hundred dollars. He declined the call twice, but finally, laying the matter before the Synod, was constrained to accept.

Here, as at Lawrenceburg, the church was filled to overflowing to hear the young, original, earnest preacher. During his ministry of eight years at Indianapolis, there were three seasons of revival. In the spring of 1842 about one hundred persons joined the church. One spring Mr. Beecher preached for seventy consecutive nights. He loved to recall those days. He said, "Talk of a young mother's feelings over her first babe—what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart color. The homeliest things dipped in that forever after glow with celestial hues."

Other churches besides his own were blessed with his ministrations. He says, "For eight or ten years I labored for the poor and needy, in cabins, in camp-meetings, through woods, up and down, sometimes riding two days to meet my appointments. I had no books but my Bible; and I went from one to the other—from the Bible to men, and from men to the Bible."

Yet when he could be at home he was a diligent reader of other books,—the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, of Isaac Barrow, and of Robert South. He pored over Loudon's EncyclopÆdias of Horticulture, Agriculture, and Architecture. He became the editor of the Indiana Farmer and Gardener.

He loved to work among flowers and raise vegetables, which he often took to market before daylight. He believed in manual labor. He painted his own house, and did not hesitate to bring his groceries home in a wheelbarrow. He said: "It is my deliberate conviction that physical labor is indispensable to intellectual and moral health."

He was as fearless as he was industrious. One man had taken offence at Mr. Beecher's plain-speaking about some of his brutal acts. He stationed himself on the hotel steps, pistol in hand, to meet the pastor as he should return from the post-office.

"Did you say thus in your sermon yesterday?" asked the man.

"I did," was the reply.

"Did you intend those remarks for me, or were you meaning me?"

"I most certainly did."

"Then,"—with an oath, "take it back right here, or I'll shoot you on the spot."

"Shoot away," said Mr. Beecher, looking the man squarely in the face, and passed on. The man followed for a few steps, and then went down a side street.

Although one of Mr. Beecher's elders had said, "If an Abolitionist comes here, I will head a mob and put him down," the brave preacher sat on the platform at an Abolitionist meeting, and in his pulpit preached so earnestly against slavery that it was predicted that his influence for all time would be destroyed. He lectured as earnestly against intemperance and other sins; and these "Lectures to Young Men" became his first volume, dedicated to his father. The book had a wide reading, both in England and America.

While at Indianapolis his little son George died. Years later he said, "I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night that my eldest son died. That was my first great sorrow.... It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered with snow.

"We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage and took the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bottom of it.... If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it."

Mr. Beecher loved the West, and expected to remain permanently in it; but the East had learned of his earnestness and his eloquence, and called him to Brooklyn. For a long time he refused to consider it; but his wife having suffered much from chills and fever, he finally accepted the call to the newly organized Plymouth Church, with twenty-one members, in the fall of 1847, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. In two years the membership had grown to over four hundred, and a new church had been built—the other having been badly damaged by fire—at a cost of $36,000.

A month after Mr. Beecher's arrival in Brooklyn, his little girl, "Caty," died, and began, as he says, "her quiet march toward the once-opened gate, to rejoin the brother."

From this time onward till Mr. Beecher's death in 1887, for forty years, Plymouth Church became the centre of almost unparalleled influence. Dr. Barrows says with truth, "It is probable that, except Westminster Abbey, no other church of English-speaking nations has in this century been visited by so many men and women of renown."

The church, accommodating three thousand persons, was year by year crowded to repletion, often as many going away as could find standing-room within. Everybody wanted to hear the most eloquent pulpit orator in America.

When Mr. Beecher first came to Plymouth Church, some said he would not please the cultivated East, but his earnestness soon satisfied all cavillers. He had one message, as he said, "The love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning reality.... Consequently I went into this work with all my soul, preaching night and day."

The slavery question had now come to be the foremost question among the people. By the Missouri Compromise of 1821, slavery was not to extend north beyond latitude 36° 30´. When, in 1849, California asked admittance to the Union as a free State, the South, feeling that the balance of power would be on the side of freedom, bitterly opposed it. Henry Clay, the great compromiser, brought forward his "Omnibus Bill" in 1850, the principal features of which were that California should be a free State, and the Fugitive Slave Law should be more stringent, so that Southerners might reclaim slaves in the Northern States, and take them back to bondage, and it should be the duty of Northerners to help them. President Millard Fillmore signed these measures.

Mr. Beecher wrote for the New York Independent a three-column article, entitled, "Shall We Compromise?" The dying John C. Calhoun had it read twice to him. "The man who says that is right," he repeated. "There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery."

When Daniel Webster, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, favored compromise, "Then it was that I flamed," said Mr. Beecher, and from that time till the Civil War was over he was at a white heat.

When Wendell Phillips was denied a place to speak because he was an Abolitionist, and no one dared to rent a hall for him through fear of a mob, Henry Ward Beecher opened Plymouth pulpit. He went to every trustee for his consent. It the man hesitated, Mr. Beecher said, "You and I will break if you don't give me this permission," and he signed.

A great audience assembled, and men were ready with revolvers to use them if the mob molested the speaker.

Mr. Beecher would not ride in omnibuses where colored persons were refused. He invited Frederick Douglass to sit beside him on the platform in Plymouth Church—he would not have a pulpit, which half hid the pastor from his people. Mr. Beecher's sister, Mrs. Stowe, had published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a serial in 1851, and in book form in 1852, which electrified the North and infuriated the South.

When Stephen A. Douglas proposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was carried in 1854, Kansas became a battle-ground between slaveholders and lovers of freedom. Houses were burned, men were murdered, and all the horrors of civil war continued for four years. Mr. Beecher's voice and pen were never silent: "Peace in Kansas," he said, "means peace everywhere; war there will be war all over the land.... What is done must be done quickly. Funds must be freely given, arms must be had, even if bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: 'He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.'"

He took up collections in Plymouth Church and elsewhere for Sharp's rifles, and for Bibles as well. Some of the rifles were sent, it is said, in boxes marked Bibles, though without his knowledge, and were therefore called "Beecher's Bibles."

When John C. FrÉmont was the first nominee of the Republicans in 1856, Mr. Beecher, with the hearty concurrence of his church, spoke for the party two or three times a week all through the State of New York. An amusing incident occurred at Rome, N.Y., which illustrated Beecher's graphic utterance.

He said: "My friends, in this great campaign there are but two sides, and we must range ourselves upon one side or the other; there is no middle ground for any of us. On the one side is Buchanan, with the black shield of slavery, and upon the other is FrÉmont, with the white banner of liberty, and with one or the other of these two you must take your stand; but who is this that I see crawling under the fence? Oh, that is Millard Fillmore." Immediately a little fellow in the front row jumped up, looked under the chairs, and shouted out, "Where is he?" The people laughed so heartily, that the lad got up and left the hall.

Mr. Beecher was always quick at repartee, either in conversation or address. Before an audience of ten thousand people in Chicago, he was lecturing on "Communism," and said, "The voice of the people is the voice of God." A man in the gallery shouted, "The voice of the people is the voice of a fool." Beecher replied simply, "I said the voice of the people, not the voice of one man."

In one of his anti-slavery speeches he said "that it was a penitentiary offence to teach a slave." A man in the corner of the gallery exclaimed, "It's a lie!"

"Well," said Beecher, "I shall not argue with the gentleman in the corner, as doubtless he has been there and ought to know."

Very stirring scenes were witnessed in these times. Two Edmonson sisters, of light complexion, whose mother was born a slave, but whose father was free, had been brought up in Washington. The former owner of the mother, finding that they were uncommonly attractive, determined to send them to New Orleans to be sold in the slave market. The girls tried to escape, but could not.

Their heart-broken father went to New York to see if he could raise the two thousand dollars demanded for their purchase. He was advised to see Mr. Beecher. He reached his home in Brooklyn; but having met many rebuffs, he feared to ring the bell, and sat down on the steps, while tears coursed down his cheeks. Mr. Beecher finally heard his story and arranged for a meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle. He spoke with wonderful power, as did also the Rev. Dr. John Dowling, the father of the brilliant Rev. Dr. George Thomas Dowling. The sum of twenty-two hundred dollars was raised, and the girls were set free.

Mr. Beecher said, "I think that of all the meetings that I have attended in my life, for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that. I have seen a great many in my day."

Mrs. Stowe became responsible for the education of the sisters, and later raised enough money to purchase the freedom of the mother and two other children.

Among several who were bought for liberty "on the auction-block of Plymouth pulpit," was "Pinky," a little colored girl. "She was bought and overbought," said Mr. Beecher. "The rain never fell faster than the tears fell from many that were here." Rose Terry Cooke threw her ring into the contribution box, and Mr. Beecher put it on the child's hand and told her "it was her freedom-ring." Her expression was such a happy one that Eastman Johnson, the artist, painted her on canvas, looking at her freedom-ring. Later she was sent for a year to Lincoln University at Washington, and went back to her own people to become a teacher and a missionary among them.

In these years of incessant toil, Mr. Beecher's home was gladdened by the birth of twin boys, Alfred and Arthur, in December, 1852. They both died on the fourth of July in the following year, and were buried in one grave. Mr. Beecher could not hear their names mentioned for years, so overwhelming was the loss to the man who idolized children.

In the autumn of 1854, by the aid of friends, he purchased a farm of nearly one hundred acres at Lenox, Berkshire County, Mass. He was a devoted lover of trees. Speaking of a large elm, he said, "It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face; and when I whispered to myself, 'This is mine,' there was a shrinking, as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers!... Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots and the age from thy trunk."

Though he said, "The chief use of a farm is to lie down upon," knowing as all brain workers know, how restful it is to stretch one's self upon the ground, yet he always cultivated flowers and vegetables, and made the whole farm a thing of beauty.

He felt that he owed much to Ruskin's works. "The sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what they were to us. We have learned a language and come to a sympathy in them more through the instrumentality of Ruskin's works than by all other instrumentalities on earth, excepting, always, the nature which my mother gave me—sainted be her name."

When the slavery struggles had culminated in war, and the South had fired the first gun at Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, Beecher's heart was aflame. In his pulpit he said, "Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I may maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the fathers in the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth!"

When his eldest son—he had already enlisted—said, "Father, may I enlist?" the instant reply was, "If you don't, I'll disown you."

After helping to fit out two regiments, Mr. Beecher took upon himself the entire equipping of a new one, called "The Long Island Volunteers," afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York.

Plymouth Church parlors became a workshop, where, under Mrs. Beecher's direction, women made articles for the soldiers at the front. By personal solicitation large sums were raised from families and merchants. Mr. Beecher told his wife to use all his salary except the smallest amount necessary for family expenses. He made patriotic addresses which were read and talked about the country over. "It is probable," said the well-known journalist, Frederick Hudson, "that there is not another man in the United States who is as much heard and read as Henry Ward Beecher, unless the other man is Wendell Phillips."

The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher said, "We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child that we have, and our own selves; we will bring all that we are and all that we have, and offer them up freely—but this country shall be one and undivided. We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that universal. The Atlantic shall sound it, and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South—'One nation, one constitution, one starry banner!' Hear it, England!—one country, and indivisible; one hope; one baptism; one constitution; one government; one nation; one country; one people—cost what it may, we will have it!"

He urged immediate and universal emancipation, with all the fire and eloquence of his nature. He became the warm friend of President Lincoln, with whom he had many confidential conferences. When the immortal Emancipation Proclamation was issued, declaring that after Jan. 1, 1863, the slaves "shall be thenceforward and forever free," Beecher said in his lecture-room talk, Dec. 31: "As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God may peel me and bark me and strip me of my leaves, and do as he chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough.... I have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the lives of men that will not die."

In June, 1863, worn out with continuous speaking, Mr. Beecher went to Europe with Dr. John Raymond, then president of Vassar College. He had been over before, in 1850, thirteen years previously. He travelled in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and at the request of the United States Minister, talked with King Leopold of Belgium, a wise and able man, about American affairs.

The king, asking Mr. Beecher what he thought of sending Maximilian to Mexico, he replied, "Your Majesty, any man that wants to sit upon a throne in Mexico, I would advise to try Vesuvius first; if he can sit there for a while, then he might go and try it in Mexico." His words proved true for the unfortunate Maximilian and Carlotta.

Henry Ward Beecher found in England much sympathy with the slave-holding South, and a disbelief in the ultimate success of the North, and continuance of the Union. Going to Europe for rest, he did not intend to speak, but was finally persuaded that it was his duty to win friends for the North, so that England should not declare for the Southern Confederacy.

The first meeting was held at Manchester, Oct. 9, 1863. The streets were placarded with huge posters in red ink, and threats were heard on every side that the speaker should never leave Free Trade Hall alive.

As soon as Beecher began to speak, there were hisses and yells by the mob, so that not a word could be heard. Standing erect before the howling crowd, he said, "My friends, we will have a whole night's session, but we will be heard." When not a word could reach the people, he leaned over to the reporters present, and said: "Gentlemen, be kind enough to take down what I say. It will be in sections, but I will have it connected by and by."

Finally by courage and wit and eloquence the crowd was subdued and won over to the speaker, who discussed the dire effects of slavery upon the manufacturing interests of the world, and stated the real condition of America in her struggle between slavery and liberty.

He said: "If the day shall come in one year, in two years, or in ten years hence, when the old stars and stripes shall float over every State of America; if the day shall come when that which was the accursed cause of this dire and atrocious war—slavery—shall be done away with; if the day shall come when through all the Gulf States there shall be liberty of speech, as there never has been; when there shall be liberty of the press, as there never has been; when men shall have common schools to send their children to, which they have never had in the South ... it will be worth all the dreadful blood and tears and woe."

Just as Beecher was closing, a telegram from London was read that "Her Majesty has to-night caused the 'broad arrow' to be placed on the rams in Mr. Laird's yard at Birkenhead." This meant the stoppage of the ships which were building for the South, to destroy our shipping as the Alabama had done. The whole audience rose and cheered, men waving their hats and women their handkerchiefs as they wept.

So moved were the people that a big fellow in the gallery, who could not shake hands with Mr. Beecher, cried out, "Shake my umbrella," as he reached it down to the platform. Mr. Beecher did as requested. "By Jocks!" said the man, "nobody sha'n't touch that umbrella again."

On Oct. 13 Beecher spoke to an immense audience at Glasgow, telling them that in building ships to destroy free labor in America, "they were driving nails in their own coffins."

The interruptions, though great here, were not as bad as at Manchester. The next evening he spoke to a packed house at Edinburgh, being lifted over the people's heads to reach the platform. These speeches were reported verbatim all over England.

On Oct. 16 he spoke at the great Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, at that time the headquarters of Southern sympathies. The meeting was a perfect bedlam. "Three cheers for Jeff Davis" were given every now and then, with cries of "Turn him out!" hisses and yells, till Beecher sat down on the edge of the platform and waited for a calm. For three hours, sentence by sentence, his voice was hurled against a threatening, hooting mob.

Four days later Henry Ward Beecher spoke to a dense crowd in Exeter Hall, London. With satire and pathos and burning eloquence, he spoke like one inspired. Dr. William M. Taylor, of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, said, "I believe there has not been such eloquence in the world since Demosthenes."

Dr. Lyman Abbott and the Rev. S. B. Halliday, in their life of Mr. Beecher, say with truth, that "he changed the public sentiment, and so the political course of the nation, and secured and cemented an alliance between the mother country and our own land, which needs no treaties to give it expression, which has been gaining strength ever since, and which no demagogism on this side of the water, and no ignorance and prejudice on that, have been able to impair."

The physical strain while in England was great. "I thought at times," he says, "that I should certainly break a blood-vessel or have apoplexy. I did not care; I was willing to die as ever I was, when hungry and thirsty, to take refreshment, if I might die for my country."

Mr. Beecher on his return was welcomed with open arms and grateful hearts by the American people. Great receptions were given him at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, and the Academy of Music, New York.

When the heart-breaking war was over, and General Lee had surrendered to General Grant under the apple-tree at Appomattox, April 9, 1865, and it was decided to raise over Fort Sumter, April 14, the flag that had been pulled down four years before, the great preacher and orator, who had helped to save the Union, was asked to deliver the address.

When Major-General Robert Anderson ran up the flag, it was saluted by a hundred guns from Fort Sumter and by a national salute from every fort that had fired upon Sumter at the beginning of the war.

Henry Ward Beecher's address was masterly; a review of the dreadful war, and our duties in the future.

That very night, April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated by the actor, J. Wilkes Booth. Mr. Beecher said in his sermon the following Sunday: "The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility.... There was a piteous helplessness. Strong men bowed down and wept.... Men walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. All business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile.... Even avarice stood still, and greed was strongly moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow. Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish."

Beecher took an active part in the reconstruction and readmission of the seceded States, urging that the greatest leniency be shown, now that they had surrendered; opposed the hanging of Jefferson Davis; urged the right of suffrage for the colored people:—"It is always inexpedient and foolish," he said, "to deny a man his natural rights." He did not believe that the freedmen should be cared for permanently by a military power at the South, placed there by the North. "We are to educate the negroes, and to Christianly educate them. We are to raise them in intelligence more and more, until they shall be able to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. For, I tell you, all the laws in the world cannot bolster a man up so as to place him any higher than his own moral worth and natural forces put him."

For a letter stating such views as these, written to the National Convention of Soldiers and Sailors held at Cleveland, O., in the autumn of 1866, Mr. Beecher was assailed all over the country. "The rage and abuse of excited men," he said, "I have too long been used to, now to be surprised or daunted.... I stood almost alone, my church, in my absence, full of excitement; all my ministerial brethren, with a few honorable exceptions, either aloof or in clamor against me; well-nigh the whole religious press denouncing me, and the political press furious."

He spoke boldly against the corrupt judges in New York City in the time of the Tweed dictatorship. Years later when Beecher voted and spoke for Grover Cleveland for the presidency, because he believed a change of parties wise for the country at the time, on account of "the corruption of too long held power," and did not trust James G. Blaine, the opposing candidate, the same denunciation and bitterness were shown; all of which proves that toleration for opinions differing from our own requires a very high type of character.

Beecher's liberal views in theology were likewise bitterly antagonized. The truth was that he cared little for creeds, believing that to preach Christ as the Saviour of the world was the paramount and vital need of men. He believed the theology of the future "would be far more powerful than the old—a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear." He felt with Whittier in the "Eternal Goodness,"—

His sermons were translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and were read the world over; and men and women grew more gentle and lovable from the reading.

After the war the busy life went on as busy as ever. One volume of the "Life of Christ," rich in his wonderful imagination and beauty of language, was written. He did not live to complete the second volume. His one novel, "Norwood," a story of New England, was published as a serial in the New York Ledger in 1867, Mr. Bonner giving him $25,000 for it.

In 1870, having resigned the editorship of the Independent, Beecher became the editor of the Christian Union. In 1872 he gave a course of twelve lectures on "Preaching" to the Divinity School of Yale College, Mr. Henry W. Sage of Plymouth Church having founded at New Haven the Lyman Beecher Lectureship of Preaching.

When asked by Mr. John R. Howard if he knew what he should say at these lectures, he replied, "Yes; in a way. I know what I am going to aim at, but of course I don't get down to anything specific. I brood it, and ponder it, and dream over it, and pick up information about one point and another; but if ever I think I see the plan opening up to me, I don't dare to look at it or put it down on paper. If I once write a thing out, it is almost impossible for me to kindle up to it again. I never dare nowadays to write out a sermon during the week; that is sure to kill it. I have to think around and about it, get it generally ready, and then fuse it when the time comes."

Beecher was a great student of the Bible, reading it on the cars as he travelled to his lecture appointments, and, like Emerson, jotting down in little note-books thoughts and suggestions.

He prepared his Sunday morning sermon in an hour and a half, between breakfast and the time of service. Locked into his room, he wrote with his goose-quill pen the headings and a few illustrations. Then in the pulpit the eloquent words came pouring from his lips, born of the time and place. His evening sermon he prepared after tea. When asked how he was able to do so much work, he said it was partly owing to a good constitution; "much, also, to an early acquired knowledge of how to take care of myself, to secure invariably a full measure of sleep, to regard food as an engineer does fuel (to be employed economically, and entirely with reference to the work to be done by the machine); much to the habit of economizing social forces, and not wasting in needless conversation and pleasurable hilarities the spirit that would carry me through many days of necessary work; but, above all, to the possession of a hopeful disposition and natural courage, to sympathy with men, and to an unfailing trust in God; so that I have always worked for the love of working."

He never used stimulants except as a medicine. He wrote to a friend, "I am a total abstainer, both in belief and practice.... I hold that no man in health needs or is the better for alcoholic stimulants; that great good will follow to the whole community from the total disuse of them as articles of diet or luxury; and that so soon as the moral sense of society will sustain such laws, it will be wise and right to enact prohibitory liquor laws.... I should as soon think of offering a well man a dose of rhubarb as a dose of brandy."

Mr. Beecher was an earnest advocate of woman suffrage as well as temperance. He believed in equality of privilege in the pulpit, in medicine, everywhere, though he said, "People may talk about equality of the sexes!... The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men." Of woman, he said, "She is the right hand of the charities of the church.... She is not only permitted in the great orthodox churches of New England to speak in meeting, but when they send her abroad, ordained to preach the gospel to the heathen, there she is permitted to preach; and when they come home, women may still teach in a hall, but not in a church, and dear old men there are yet so conservative that they are reading through golden spectacles their Bibles, and saying: 'I suffer not a woman to preach.'"

Mr. Beecher found his recreation from hard work in his love of country life. His farm at Lenox, Mass., proving too far from Brooklyn, he bought, in 1859, thirty-six acres at Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, and named it Boscobel. The old farmhouse was said to have been the headquarters of General Israel Putnam of Revolutionary fame.

He watched like a child for the first note of the bluebird and robin, for the first arbutus, anemone, and violet of early spring. He loved roses as fondly as Professor Child of Harvard College. He raised hollyhocks, dahlias, geraniums, pansies, lilies, and chrysanthemums. He said, "The wonder is, that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir."

He bought trees of almost every variety, chickens of various kinds, Jersey cows and honey-bees, and a large family of dogs,—a St. Bernard, a mastiff, an Eskimo, a terrier, and others.

He once said, "If the dog isn't good for anything else, it is good for you to love, and that is a good deal." Speaking of those at Peekskill, he said, "They are practically good for nothing, but I sometimes think they are worth more to me than the whole place."

He used to say that he felt really sorry that his dog Tommy could not talk. "If ever there was a dog that was distressed to think that he could not talk, that dog is. I sit by him on the bank, of a summer evening, and I say, 'Tommy, I am sorry for you;' and he whines, as much as to say, 'So am I.' I say, 'Tommy, I should like to tell you a great many things that you are worthy of knowing;' and I do not know which is the most puzzled, he or I—I to get any idea into his head, or he to get any out of mine."

Mr. Beecher finally built a beautiful house of granite and brick, natural woods throughout the interior: first story cherry; second, ash; and third, pine, where he gathered his valuable library. "Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store?" he said; and in books and flowers and works of art he found that money melted away, so that, say his sons, William C. Beecher and the Rev. Samuel Scoville, in the life of their father, "it was in part to meet this heavy outlay that he projected and carried out the series of lecture-tours that ran through the last ten years of his life."

He had learned what many another learns, that "the most profitable kind of land-owning" is to "enjoy all that there is of beauty and peacefulness in my neighbor's lands as much as they, without the responsibility or the taxes." And yet people have to build once, to learn not to build again.

In 1872, Mr. Beecher having preached for twenty-five years in Plymouth Church, a "Silver Wedding" was celebrated by his people. Monday, Oct. 7, was the first day of the jubilee. In the sunny afternoon the three thousand children in the three Sunday-schools connected with the church marched past Mr. Beecher's house, as he stood upon his doorstep, and each child laid a flower at his feet, until he stood "literally embanked in flowers." Each day through the week had its appropriate exercises. On Thursday, the historical day, the brilliant and learned Dr. Richard S. Storrs of Brooklyn gave an eloquent address. "May your soul," said the speaker, "as the years go on, be whitened more and more in the radiance of God's light, and in the sunshine of His love!"

That soul was soon to be tested and whitened in a furnace heated almost beyond endurance. Theodore Tilton, a member of Mr. Beecher's church, had, through the influence of the latter, become the editor of the Independent. Having lost his position, apparently by his own misdeeds, and made his family unhappy, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher advised his wife to separate from him. Tilton determined to drive Beecher from his pulpit, and forced his wife to criminate the latter in character, which statements she afterwards declared again and again were untrue in every particular. Plymouth Church dropped its obnoxious member. He took the case into the courts, asking one hundred thousand dollars damages. For six months the details were read all over the world. Mr. Beecher was acquitted by his church, by the jury, and by a National Advisory Council of one hundred and seventy-two churches. Mr. William A. Beach, the leading counsel for Tilton, said later, "I had not been four days on the trial before I was confident that he was innocent.... I felt and feel now that we were a pack of hounds trying in vain to drag down a noble man." Judge Neilson, who had not known Mr. Beecher previously, became his warm friend.

Most persons who will take the trouble to go over the testimony now, after twenty years have cooled the passions of the hour, will agree with Mr. Beach. Dr. Barrows says truly, "That any man should have endured the fires which surrounded Mr. Beecher, and have come forth so radiant, so pure, so self-respecting, and so widely trusted and beloved, is a moral miracle, the parallel of which it would be difficult to find."

The expenses of the trial year were $118,000; and though Plymouth Church raised Mr. Beecher's salary for that year to $100,000, he found himself deeply in debt. To pay this indebtedness he gave a series of lectures during the next two or three years. "The Reign of the Common People," "The Burdens of Society," "Conscience," "The Uses of Wealth," "The Ministry of the Beautiful," "Evolution and Religion," were among his most popular lectures. Upon the last, though a deep subject, I have seen five thousand persons strangely moved by his eloquence.

Although in some places he was jeered at by the rabble, yet year by year he found great strength and comfort in the love of the people. He wrote home that preaching Sunday evening in Boston, "Ten thousand people couldn't get in. Shook hands with whole audiences. Papers next morning with kind notices. Went to Congregational ministers' meeting on Monday morning. Cheered and clapped when I entered. After prayer for day was finished it was moved that I address the meeting. I did so, and closed with prayer. All wept, and it broke up like a revival meeting."

In 1886, when Mr. Beecher was seventy-three years of age, he consented to go a third time to England, to see his friends and lecture. Mrs. Beecher accompanied him, with his friend and lecture agent, Major J. B. Pond. Three thousand Plymouth Church people came to see him set sail in the early morning of June 19. Dodworth's band played "Hail to the Chief;" and then, as the vessel moved away, the great crowd sang, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." One friend had sent a basket of twenty homing pigeons; and these in the afternoon carried back messages to the loved ones.

Everywhere in England Henry Ward Beecher was received with a royal welcome. There were no more meetings like those at Manchester and Liverpool in the days of the Civil War. So vast were the crowds to hear him preach, that the congregations had to be admitted by ticket. Thousands were necessarily turned away. His first lecture was at Exeter Hall, London.

"Between July 4 and Oct. 21, fifteen and one-half weeks," says Mr. Pond in his book, "A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher," "Mr. Beecher preached seven times, gave nine public addresses, and delivered fifty-eight lectures. For the fifty-eight lectures he cleared the sum of $11,600, net of all expenses for himself and Mrs. Beecher from the day they sailed from New York."

It is estimated that Mr. Beecher earned by his pen and voice during forty years in Brooklyn nearly a million and a half dollars, most of which he gave away.

But much as he enjoyed England, the brave man was growing weary with the work of life. He wrote, "I want to come home.... I long every year to lay down my tasks and depart.... It is simply a quiet longing of the spirit, a brooding desire to be through with my work, although I am willing to go on, if need be."

He came home Oct. 31, 1886, and soon promised to complete the second volume of the "Life of Christ." He also made a contract with a publishing firm to have his autobiography ready before July 1, 1888.

He wrote some on each book during the winter. March 3 he went to New York with his wife, who said, "I never knew my husband so lively, tender, or joyous before, or not in a long time." That night he retired early, feeling weary. The next day, Friday, he slept nearly all day, and, being aroused to go to a prayer-meeting, said he did not feel like getting up. A physician came in the afternoon and in the evening, and asked Mr. Beecher to raise his hand. He could not. The left side showed signs of paralysis. It was apoplexy.

The great man watched the faces of his wife and the doctor, seemed to divine the result, closed his eyes, gave the hand of his wife "a long, strong, loving, and earnest pressure. It was the realization of the inevitable. It was farewell. He never opened his eyes again. His sleep, thereafter, was constant.... From Saturday morning until the end were silence, sleep, heavy but regular breathing, and unconsciousness.... Mrs. Beecher held his hand in hers continually. When the end approached all the household were gathered.... Not one of them shed a tear or gave expression to a sob—then and there. The supreme self-control was in obedience to Mr. Beecher's often expressed hope and wish that around his bed of release no tears should fall, but the feeling should prevail as those who think of a soul gone to its crowning."

At half-past nine, Tuesday morning, March 8, 1887, the end came. He had often said, "Provide flowers for me, not crape, when I am gone;" so at once a wreath of pink and white roses were hung upon the door-knob.

Private funeral services were held at the house on Thursday, conducted by the Rev. Charles H. Hall, Rector of Trinity Church, Brooklyn, who in Mr. Beecher's time of trial, seeing him in his congregation, went down the aisle, took him by the hand, and led him to a seat within the chancel. Mr. Beecher never forgot a kind act, and wished Dr. Hall to attend at his burial.

"There was no man whom I ever heard," said Dr. Hall, "or whose works I have ever read, who inspired me so deeply with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He was a man of men, the most manly man I ever met; but he was also a man of God in the pre-eminent sense of the word."

The body was escorted to the church by Company G of the Thirteenth Regiment—"My boys," Mr. Beecher called them, as many were of Plymouth Church.

The coffin was laid in a perfect bower of flowers, lilies of the valley, maidenhair fern, and smilax entirely covering it. The organ, platform, and pulpit chair were a mass of bloom,—roses and pinks and graceful plants.

All day long, until ten at night, the throng of people, half or three-quarters of a mile in extent, passed by to look at the beloved face. On Friday, only those were admitted who had tickets. Four churches were open for services, and all were crowded. All public offices and schools were closed, and business was suspended.

Dr. Hall made the address at the funeral. Very tenderly he said of the dead preacher, "On his last Sunday evening in this place, two weeks ago, after the congregation had retired from it, the organist and one or two others were practising the hymn,—

"Mr Beecher, doubtless with that tire that follows a pastor's Sunday work, remained and listened. Two street urchins were prompted to wander into the building; and one of them was standing in the position of the boy whom Raphael has immortalized, gazing up at the organ. The old man, laying his hands on the boy's head, turned his face upward and kissed him; and with his arms about the two, left the scene of his triumphs, his trials, and his successes forever.

"It was a fitting close to a grand life, the old man of genius and fame shielding the little wanderers, great in breasting traditional ways and prejudices, great also in the gesture, so like him, that recognized, as did the Master, that the humblest and poorest were his brethren, the great preacher led out into the night by the little nameless waifs."

After the services the doors were opened, and one hundred thousand people passed through the church by the coffin.

On Saturday, March 12, the body was taken to Greenwood Cemetery, and temporarily placed in a receiving vault filled with abundant flowers. Later it was buried on Dawn Path, near Hillside Avenue, on the south-easterly slope of Ocean Hill, with a simple headstone.

"When I fall," said the great preacher, "and am buried in Greenwood, let no man dare to stand over the turf and say, 'Here lies Henry Ward Beecher;' for God knows that I will not lie there. Look up! if you love me, and if you feel that I have helped you on your way home, stand with your feet on my turf and look up; for I will not hear anybody that does not speak with his mouth toward heaven."

CHARLES KINGSLEY.