History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 71

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed
Publication date: 1890
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & co
Number of Pages: 1034

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In society he was genial and mirthful, full of anec- dote, talking so admirably well that his friends would have been content to be mere listeners, yet never will- ing to assume more than his due share in conversa- tion. There was a native refinement and unstudied delicacy in his manners and his social intercourse, indicating an inward life on a high plane, and by unobtrusive example and influence constantly tend- ing to elevate the prevailing tone of sentiment and feeling around him. To those most intimate with him it was impossible that he could be replaced. We have not seen, and may not hope ever to see his like in this vorld.

With a temperament that might have seemed pliant id ductile, no man was ever more strongly in-

trenched than he within the defences of a true, quick, sensitive and discriminating conscience. No un- worthy compliance ever cast a transient shadow even on his early youth. We, who knew him from boy- hood, could recall, when he went from us, not an act or a word which we would wish to forget.

He was firm in the right, and no power on earth could make him swerve from his conviction of duty. His force of character, hidden on ordinary occasions by his gentle, sunny mien, showed itself impregnable when put to the test. He never shrank from the most painful duty, and in prompt decision and fear- less energy for difficult emergencies he seemed no less worthy of supreme regard than for those amiable qualities which made his daily life so beautiful.

It can hardly he needful to say that a character like his could have had no other foundation than ma- tured Christian faith and principle. He was unfeign- edly reverent and devout. He loved the worship and ordinances of religion, and gave them the support of his constant attendance, his unfailing interest and his earnest advocacy. He took from Jesus Christ the law of his life, breathed in His spirit, trusted in His gospel of salvation and immortality, and looked to Him for guidance through the death-shadow into the everlasting light.

Mr. Felton's literary activity was incessant, but he seems to have had very little ambition to appear be- fore the public in his own name and on his own sole ac- count. It may be doubted whether he ever published anything, except at the solicitation of others, and he was thus often led into partnerships in which his share of the labor far exceeded that of the revenue, whether of fame or material recompense.

In 1844 he published an edition of the "Iliad," with very valuable English notes and with Flaxman's illustrations. In 1840 he prepared a Greek Reader, with English notes and vocabulary. This continued long in use, perhaps is not yet out of use, and is, proba- bly, to be preferred to any other similar text-book in the fitness and range of its selections, in the facilities which it furnishes and in those which it wisely fails to furnish for the student. In the same year he con- tributed to Ripley's "Specimens of Foreign Litera- ture" a translation of Menzel's work on "" German Literature," in three volumes. In 1841 be published an edition of " The Clouds" of Aristophanes, with an introduction and notes. This has been republished in England. In 1843 he contributed very largely to a work on " Classic Studies," edited by Professors Sears and Edwards, and also to Professor Longfellow's "Poets and Poetry of Europe." In 1844, in connec- tion with Professor Beck, he made a translation of Munk's "Metres of the Greeks and Romans." In 1847 he published editions of the "Panegyricus " of Isocrates, and of the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus, each with introduction and notes. In 1849 he trans- lated Professor Guyot's work entitled, "The Earth and Man." In the same year he issued an edition of

A. S. Peabody.

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"The Birds " of Aristophanes, with introduction and notes, which was reprinted in England. In 1852 he published a selection from the writings of his prede- cessor, Dr. Popkin, with a most happily-written mem- oir. In the same year he issued a volume of selec- tions from the "Greek Historians." In 1856 he pub- lished a series of selections from modern Greek writers in poetry and prose. He contributed to Sparks' "American Biography " a "Life of General Eaton."

In addition to these works, he published many lec- tures and addresses. His aid was constantly sought by the editors of various periodicals, to which he was a large contributor. If we remember aright, his earliest writings of this sort were literally labors of love for the American Monthly Review, edited by the late Professor Sidney Willard, a work designed to give a fair and truthful statement and estimate of cur- rent American literature, which had an early death, solely because it was too honest to live. He was a frequent contributor to the North American Review and to the Christian Examiner. He wrote for Appleton's " New American Cyclopædia " several long and elab- orate articles, particularly in his own special depart- ment.

But the works most characteristic of his mind and heart, of his ability, scholarship, taste and sentiment, were not designed for publication, and were not issued till after his death, when they appeared under the editorship of the writer of this memoir. They are "Familiar Letters from Europe," and "Greece, Ancient and Modern." The former was a small volume of let- ters of travel written to his family with no ulterior pur- pose, yet with a fidelity of description, a vividness of comprehension and a charming spontaneity of graceful diction that not only needs no revision, but would have suffered damage by any endeavor to improve them. The latter comprises four courses of Lowell "Lectures on Greece," in two large octavo volumes.

We doubt whether there exists in our language any other work on Greece that comprehends so much and is at the same time so entirely the outcome of the author's own study, thought and observation. As the lectures were hastily written, many of them on the eve of delivery, it was thought desirable to verify ref- erences and translations, but this labor proved to be almost needless. There was in his manuscript the strange blending of a chirography bearing tokens of hot haste, and a minuteness and accuracy showing that his materials were at his command at momentary notice, though a large portion of them were such as seemed to require elaborate research. There is no reason why these volumes should not live and last, as at once of profound interest to the general reader and of essential service for the special study of the Greece that was and the Greece that is.

Mr. Felton was an active member of the Massachu- setts Historical Society and of the American Acad- emy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a member of

the New England Historic Genealogical Society and of various literary and scientific bodies, in all of which he bore as large a part as his busy life rendered possible. He was for several years one of the regents of the Smith- sonian Institution and a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, while he manifested equal effi- ciency and diligence in the less conspicuous office of a member of the School Committee of Cambridge, where his services are commemorated iu a school- house that bears his name.

He was a corresponding member of the Archæo- logical Society of Athens. He received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Amherst College in 1848, and from Yale College in 1860.

Mr. Felton was twice married-April 12, 1838, to Mary, daughter of Asa and Mary (Hammond) Whit- ney, and in September, 1846, to Mary Louisa, daugh- ter of Thomas Graves and Mary (Perkins) Cary. He left two sons and three daughters.

ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY, D.D., LL.D.

Dr. Peabody is descended from Lieutenant Francis Peabody, who was born in 1614 in St. Albans, Hert- fordshire, England, and came to New England in the ship " Planter" in 1635, settling in Lynn, and later, in 1638, in Hampton, Old Norfolk County, subse- quently to which time he became an inhabitant of Tops- field, where, in 1657, he married Mary Foster, dying February 19, 1697-98. He is the American ancestor of a numerous and honorable posterity in Essex County and elsewhere, among whom the distinguished philanthropist, George Peabody, of London, is espe- cially to be named. Lieutenant 1Francis Peabody's son 2Joseph, born in 1644, who lived in Boxford, was the father of "Zerubabel, born February 26, 1707, who lived in Middleton, married Lydia Fuller February 21, 1733, and was the father of +Andrew, born July 21, 1745, married Ruth Curtis December 13, 1769, lived in Middleton, and died October 14, 1813. His son 5Andrew, born February 29, 1772, married Mary Rantoul, sister of Hon. Robert Rantoul, Sr., of Bev- erly, at Salem, May 30, 1808; lived in Beverly, where he kept the grammar school, and was a teacher of repute, and died December 19, 1813. The subject of this sketch was born in Beverly March 19, 1811. In a reminiscence contributed to a series of autobio- graphical articles by eminent men (published in the Forum for July, 1887) he has himself unconsciously disclosed the dominant chord in his own character while describing the Spartau educational methods of the earlier years in this century :

" I learned to read before I was three years old, and foremost among the books that have helped me I must put Webster's spelling-book. I knew the old lexicographer. He was a good man, hut hard, dry, un- sentimental. I do not suppose that in hie earliest reading-lessons for children he had auy ulterior purpose beyond shaping sentences com- posed of words consisting of three letters and less. But, while I believe in the inspiration of the prophets and apostles, I agree with the Chris- tian fathers of the Alexandrian school in extending the theory of in- spiration far beyond the (80-called) canon of Scripture, and I cannot

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hut think that a divine afflatus breathed upon the soul of Noah Web- ster when he framed as the first sentence on which the infant mind should concentrate its nascent capacity of combining letters into words and which thus, by long study and endless ropetition, must needs deposit itself in undying memory : ' No man can put off the law of God.' When I toiled day after day on this sentence I probably had no idea of its meaning, but there is nothing better for a child than to learn by rots and to fix in enduring remembrance words which thus sown deep will blossom into fruitful meaning with growing years Since I hegan to think and fssl on subjects within the province of ethics this maxim has never been out of my mind. I have employed it as a text for my exper- ience and observation. It is a fundamental truth in my theology. It underlies my moral philosophy. It has molded my sthical teaching In the pulpit and the class-room, in utterance and print."

From his sixth year until he entered college he supplied himself "with books from a library of sev- eral hundred very good books, the proprietors of which were assessed fifty cents a year." His earliest teacher, to whom he owed much, was Miss Joanna Prince, who later married Ebenezer Everett, of Brunswick, Me., and was the mother of Professor Charles Car- roll Everett. He was also a pupil of Miss Hannah Hill in the first Sunday-school in the United States, which these two ladies had gathered in Beverly, and had the satisfaction later of teaching Miss Hill Greek in her old age in fulfillment of her desire to read the New Testament in the original tongue. A child of pre- cious promise, he was on the point of being sent to Exeter Academy when the wise minister, Dr. Abbot, persuaded his mother to have him prepared for col- lege at home under the teaching of Mr. Bernard Whitman, who was then pursuing his studies for the Unitarian ministry with that distinguished clergy- man, and he was fitted for college in a year, passing the examinations for the Freshman Class in 1823, and returning to live in Beverly under the same teaching another year, in which he went over the studies of the first two years of the college course, returning again to Cambridge to join the Junior Class in August, 1824, and graduating in 1826 in the same class with his cousin, Hon. Robert Rantoul, Jr. No less than fourteen members of his class entered the Christian ministry, among them the theologian Oliver Stearns, the eloquent preacher George Putnam, and Nehe- miah Adams, the Calvinistic divine. His father had set him apart for the ministry, as far as it could be done, by a request on his death-bed; but the boy, who had graduated at fifteen, finishing his academic course at an earlier age than any other graduate of Harvard College, with the possible exception of Paul Dudley and Cotton Mather, was too young to begin his theo- logical studies, and the following three years were spent-the first in study at Beverly, teaching in the winter the same district school in Middleton where his father had first taught ; the second as private tutorin the family of Mr. Huidekoper, of Meadville, Pa., where not a few eminent men have both given and received much in a home of patriarchal simplicity and manor- ial beauty, and the third in teaching in the academy at Portsmouth, N. H. In 1829 he entered the Cam- bridge Divinity School, graduating from it in 1832. The next year was spent as college tutor of Hebrew

and Mathematics at Cambridge. At this time his first publication appeared, " Address on Taxation," being No. 1, vol. i., of the " Workingmen's Library."

President Quincy desired to secure Mr. Peabody for permanent academic service. He had, however, been preaching in various places during the year, be- ing called to settle over churches in Fall River and Framingham, and accepted an invitation to become minister of the South Parish in Portsmonth, N. H., as colleague with the Rev. Nathan Parker, D.D., one of the most honored clergymen of his time in New England, whose lofty character, distinguished alike for wisdom and goodness, has left an abiding mark npon that intelligent Christian community. Mr. Peabody took charge of that pulpit September 1, 1833.

His previous year spent in Portsmouth as a teacher had brought him into such personal relations with Dr. Parker as to make him appreciate as a special privilege the opportunity of laboring in such com- panionship, but the hope was sadly disappointed, as Dr. Parker's rapidly-failing health did not even per- mit him to take part in the ordination of his col- league and successor in October, 1833, and his death a few days later left the young clergyman alone in charge of a most important parish.

The South Church, which was the second in Ports- mouth, had its origin, as was the case in many of the older parishes in New England, in a dissension about the best locality for a new meeting-house. It early leaned to Arminianism, while the North Church, long under the ministry of the elder Buckminster, held fast to the more strict theology, and at the separa- tion of the Congregational body, in the earlier years of this century, the former had become a leading parish in the Unitarian movement. Under the seri- ous evangelical preaching of Dr. Parker it had been strengthened and increased in numbers till, not long before his death, it had built one of the most beauti- ful and costly stone churches of the time in New Eng- land, which was filled with worshipers. This re- sponsible charge was borne by the young minister and prospered in his hands. The further increase of the congregation to the number of two hundred and fifty families made it necessary to enlarge the church. A handsome chapel was built for the large and flour- ishing Sunday-school, and all the signs of profes- sional success in a high degree were evident.

On September 12, 1836, Mr. Peabody was married to Catharine Whipple, daughter of Edmund Roberts, of Portsmouth, who, as Envoy of the United States Government, negotiated the first treaty between this country and Siam and Cochin-China, the journal of whose travels in remote Eastern lands was published after his death in 1837, while abroad on public busi- ness. Of the eight children of this marriage two sons and two daughters died in early childhood and four daughters are living. Mrs. Peabody died in Novem- ber, 1869.

The Portsmouth pulpit as filled by Mr. Peabody

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was metropolitan to New Hampshire. The calls to public services outside his parish multiplied upon him in the educational and charitable duties which fall in such a community to the minister of a prosper- ous and influential congregation. He was a trustee of Exeter Academy for forty-three years. One of the earliest of the many addresses which he gave on academic occasions, "Conversation, its Faults and its Graces," delivered before the Newburyport Female High School, and first printed in 1846, became a classic on the subject. In 1844 he published "Lec- tures on Christian Doctrine," which became a hand- book of the belief of the evangelical portion of the religious body to which he belonged, while a wider congregation than his Portsmouth parish was addressed by his " Christian Consolations, Sermons Designed to Furnish Comfort and Strength to the Afflicted," of which the first of many editions was published in 1846, and by his "Sermons to Children," published in 1867. He also was an editor of the Christian Re- view for two years.

In 1852 he received from Harvard College the de- gree of Doctor of Divinity. He was a frequent con- tributor to the Christian Examiner and the North American Review, and in 1852 he became proprietor and editor of the latter publication, which place he filled until 1863. The invitation to the Plummer Pro- fessorship of the Heart and of Christian Morals in Harvard College found Dr. Peabody in a happy and successful ministry at Portsmouth, over a parish to whom he was bound by ties of mutual attachment such as no other call could have been strong enough to break.

On September 1, 1860, he assumed the Plummer Professorship, and the new work on which Dr. Pea- body now entered, as successor to the Rev. Frederick Daniel Huntington, D.D., was waiting to be shaped by him into a large and unique opportunity of service and influence. The wise munificence of Miss Caro- line Plummer, of Salem, had been led to endow the "Professorship of the Heart and of Christian Morals" by the conviction that the "dry light " and unsym- pathetic methods of college training needed to be suffused with the warmth and glow of a personal influence exerted by a Christian minister of wide and ready sympathy, hearty interest in young men, aud belief in them-not a teacher only, nor a preacher only, but one who should find what possibilities existed in Harvard College for the function of pastor to the most difficult class of persons in the world to reach-youths of the student age. No one could have ventured to anticipate the way in which Dr. Peabody was to grow into the place, or the degree in which his influence was destined to pervade the Cam- bridge atmosphere like sunshine, doing more, perhaps, than any other single cause to soften and change the temper of mutual antagonism and mutual distrust, which largely affected the relations of the Faculty and the students.

The years of Dr. Peabody's incumbency of the one position which was created to be mediatorial between the two elements witnessed a change for the better, greater than had been wrought in the two previous centuries.

The proper official work of the Plummer Professor- ship had included the duties of preacher to the uni- versity and some slight teaching of each class at the beginning of the Freshmen and at the end of the Senior year, while the pulpit services were lightened by being assumed by the president (when he was a clergyman) on one Sunday of each month. Except during the presidency of Dr. Hill, however, the bur- den of the university pulpit now fell wholly upon Dr. Peabody, and for twenty-one years was so borne as to keep that distinguished place at the height of its reputation as the voice in sacred things of the mother and chief of American colleges.

The degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred on Dr. Peabody by the University of Rochester in 1863.

The publications of Dr. Peabody during the period after his removal to Cambridge may be noted here. In 1861 he delivered and published a course of lec- tures before the Lowell Institute, entitled, "Chris- tianity the Religion of Nature," and in 1873 a volume of sermons on " Christian Belief and Life." Besides a multitude of single sermons, lectures, orations, dis- cussions in the reviews of great questions of public interest and memoirs of distinguished persons, the following volumes have also been given to the public by him: "Manual of Moral Philosophy," 1872; "Christianity and Science," a series of lectures deliv- ered in New York in 1874 on the Ely foundation of the Union Theological Seminary, 1874. The Bacca- laureate sermons, which he preached to successive classes on the Sunday before Commencement, and which were long a marked feature of academic life, were gathered up in a volume, embracing those preached in successive years from 1861 to 1883, when the emeritus professor might well have sup- posed that his long service in the interesting duty was ended; but in 1885 and 1886 the graduating classes still felt that from no other could they ask the farewell word in behalf of their alma mater. A part of the fruit of his ethical instruction in the divin- ity school and in the college appeared in his transla- tions of " Cicero's De Officiis De Senectute, De Ami- citiâ and the Tusculan Disputation," published in 1883-4-6, and of "Plutarch's De Sera Numis Vin- dicta," published in 1885. In 1887 he published further fruits of his college teaching in the valuable work on "Moral Philosophy," which embodies a por- tion of the lectures given by him to the Senior Class in college and in the divinity school at Meadville, Pa.

The Cambridge life devolved upon Dr. Peabody, heyond the duties of his professorship, not a few such obligations as seek a public-spirited citizen with heavy demands upon his time. On the School

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Committee he gave many years of service, and in other matters which furthered the cause of good gov- ernment of the city he was never backward. Only an exceptional endowment of health and a bodily frame strong as iron, which was able to bear habitual labor far into the small hours of the night, could have endured the toil.

As a teacher the work which fell into his strong and willing hands naturally broadened more and more. The subject of ethics belonged strictly to his de- partment as religious teacher, but in addition he taught logie and political economy until the appointment of Professor Dunbar, and had the care of the Senior forensics for some years, also filling gaps when they occurred in the college and in the divinity school. A portion of this labor bore fruit in several of his printed works.

Meantime, the friendly and fatherly relation in which he stood to the students had beneficent results. When the wise generosity of Mr. Nathaniel Thayer provided the means for reviving in a better form the old "Commons," furnishing good food to the great mass of the students for a moderate sum, the task of organizing this large enterprise was undertaken by Dr. Peabody, until he had proved that it was a wise experiment and had established it on a permanent basis at the public tables of Memorial Hall. The thoughtful and abounding private charities which sought his aid as almoner in finding and relieving needy students-a form of college benefit which es- capes all public record-were very great in amount, and were alone sufficient to occupy much of the time of a busy man. It would be impossible to overstate the quantity and quality of his service in personal and private relations, as adviser and confidential friend to the multitude of young men who sought his help in any kind of trouble, and never sought in vain. For all this, the unsolicited reward of a love and veneration such as it is the privilege of few to win was poured forth upon himn. No oue can have heard without a thrill the cheers, ringing with the enthusiasm of youth and of personal affection, which greeted the mention of his name, or welcomed his presence on all public occasions of the university. The Plummer Professorship also offered au oppor- tunity to bring the university into religious relations with the whole community by making its pulpit not the property of a single sect, but hospitable to all branches of the Protestant Church, which Dr. Pea- body's large and sympathetic Christian temper ful- filled to the utmost. While himself recognized as a leader in his own denomination, he had the gift of winning the Christian fellowship and conciliating by his own reconciling spirit the friendly respect of churchmen of all names, welcoming them to the Col- lege Chapel and being welcomed as a preacher iu their pulpits, while he was sought to give addresses on the public days of the theological schools of Newton, Bangor and Andover, representing various Christian

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History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 71

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed Publication date: 1890 Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & co Number of Pages: 1034

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed
Publication date: 1890
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & co
Number of Pages: 1034