And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher said shrewdly: “I shall have that boy in the ministry yet.”
In a sermon preached by his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, we have this picture:
“All of you know more about ‘Henry Ward Beecher’ than I do, but I know more about ‘Brother Henry’ than you do.
“A little Boston boy five years old had a brother Henry who was sixteen, and a brother Charles who was fourteen; and though he knew of David and Goliath, who ‘fell down slambang,’ and David, ‘little David ran up and cut his head off’! though he knew about Samson and the lion, yet for the present strength and greatness Henry and Charles were his heroes. Did they not own a long sled and coast down Copp’s Hill and jump sixteen sleds at the bounce? Did they not sharpen skates with enthusiasm and go off to the mill-dam alone?
“By night when the tocsin rang and the little boy covered his head and shivered under the sheets, did not Henry and Charles rush down two flights of stairs and out the door, yelling fire? And they were at school fitting for college at Mt. Pleasant. Their hair-trunk was two days a-packing, and the stage took them away before daylight, leaving the house so quiet and so empty. Sixteen and five—oh! how magnificent the boy of sixteen to the little boy of five. I speak of brother Henry.
“But at prayers, family prayers, Henry and Charles could sing, and so could the little boy. A frail, blue-eyed, willowy mother sat in the rocking-chair. Father would read—the little boy knew not what. But for the singing from village hymns Henry sometimes fluted, making a queer mouth; and then, all kneeling, it was ever asked by father, ‘Overturn and overturn, till He whose right it is shall come and reign, King of nations as King of saints.’
“Prayers over, Aunt Esther and the little boy, he standing in a chair, washed the dishes, and Henry and Charles stormed out to the Latin School. But they went to Mount Pleasant, and Mr. Colton was the teacher. Twice a year they came home, at Thanksgiving and the summer vacation. The expected stage drove up, and the little boy, in agony of delight that could not be endured, hid himself on a trundle-bed under mother’s and braided bed-cords till, searched out, he was tossed above the clouds by great, strong brother Henry.
“At morning prayers, ‘Thou hast brought back our boys in health,’ the little boy heard that and the ‘overturn and overturn’ part; and that little boy, now your pastor, bears witness in your ears that the boys were kept, and that since those days there have been overturnings not a few. And further he tells you that those family prayers propagated the ancestral religion in brother Henry, though they have failed to hand down the ancestral theology.
“The boys must go to college, and leave the little boy to go to infant school, to Miss Bull, and learn to tell the hour on a card clock, and add, subtract, and count with an abacus. Henry in the world of departed spirits, Amherst; Charles at Bowdoin. Every morning father praying for our boys at college: ‘May they become good ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ!’
” … Edward was a man, like father. But Henry and Charles were heroes, doing things. How they could jump! How they whirled around the horizontal bar! How Charles could flog a top! And Henry had peanuts and red peppermints. Shall I ever be big and do things, and run to fires, and go way down Milk Street?
“Yes, one vacation brother Henry took the little boy down on Milk Street, past two Unitarian churches safely, past Tremont Theatre, past an open stable-door where lay a red cow with monstrous horns, chewing her big mouth with nothing in it, and looking, oh! so strong and hungry at that little boy. But Henry wasn’t scared. He was whistling. ‘Come along, Tom,’ he said, ‘that’s only a cow.’
“Henry and Charles at college; father and eight of us staging from Boston to Cincinnati, leaving my heroes. Amherst and Bowdoin loom large in my fancy still. My heroes were to stay and grow! Tidings once a month: Charles has a fiddle, Henry has a six-keyed flute; Charles, and something about circles and geometry; Henry, and phrenology and temperance lectures.”
Such was his life in Boston, undoubtedly to a certain extent beneficial, and, by reason of the activity of the streets of the city and the bustle of the wharves, attractive. But coming at the turbulent period of his own development, when the rough elements of its thoroughfares were more congenial to him than the influences of its churches, libraries, or homes, it was far from being satisfactory. Its liberty was not altogether safe, nor were its restrictions healthful; and he says: “I cannot see how, if I had remained much longer in Boston, I could have escaped ruin.” We see him, therefore, start off on the lumbering stage-coach, in the early autumn morning before daylight, for Amherst, with a sense of relief and hearty thankfulness that he is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler.
CHAPTER VI.
School-Life at Mount Pleasant—Mathematics—Elocution—Testimony of Classmates—Religious Experiences—Troubles—A Romantic Friendship—Another Kind—Letter of Reminiscence—A Royal School-boy.
It was in 1827, and Henry was fourteen years old, when he entered the Mount Pleasant Institute. “He was admitted to the institution at a price about half the usual charge, for one hundred dollars per year.” “His appearance was robust and healthy, rather inclined to fulness of form, with a slight pink tinge on his cheeks and a frequent smile upon his face. In his manners and communications he was quiet, orderly, and respectful. He was a good-looking youth.” This is the testimony of one of his teachers, Mr. George Montague.
“I think he must have been fond of children, for he was always ready for a frolic with me. I don’t remember how he spoke, except that he talked a good deal and was full of life and fun.” So says a friend, in whose home he boarded, in a letter written during the past year.
No place could have been better fitted to the condition of the boy, as he then was, than the one chosen. He was tired of the city with its brick walls, stone pavements, and artificial restrictions, and longed for the freedom and the freshness of the country. Amherst at that time was only a small village, fighting back with indifferent success the country that pressed in upon it from every side, and offering this city-sick lad, almost within a stone’s throw of the school, the same kind of fields and forests that were around him at Litchfield, and spreading out for him a landscape equal in beauty to that of his childhood home.
Besides, he has an object in view that stirs his blood. He is to fit himself for the navy; his father has promised his influence to get him an appointment, if wanted, and Admiral Nelson and all other brave admirals and commodores are his models. For the first time in his life he takes hold of study with enthusiasm.
The institution was very popular in its day, and a great advance upon the old academy. It was semi-military in its methods, and in its government there was great thoroughness without severity. Its teachers possessed superior qualifications, and all were men of great kindness as well as of marked ability. Among them were two men who especially had great influence in directing his energies and preparing him not only for Amherst College but for the greater work beyond, and who were ever remembered by him with the deepest gratitude.
The first of these was W. P. Fitzgerald, the teacher of mathematics at Mount Pleasant school:
“He taught me to conquer in studying. There is a very hour in which a young nature, tugging, discouraged, and weary with books, rises with the consciousness of victorious power into masterhood. For ever after he knows that he can learn anything if he pleases. It is a distinct intellectual ‘conversion.’
“I first went to the blackboard, uncertain, soft, full of whimpering. ‘That lesson must be learned,’ he said, in a very quiet tone, but with a terrible intensity and with the certainty of Fate. All explanations and excuses he trod under foot with utter scornfulness. ‘I want that problem. I don’t want any reasons why I don’t get it.’
“ ‘I