"Yet, in the maddening maze of things,And tossed by storm and flood,To one fixed trust my spirit clings,—I know that God is good!And so beside the Silent SeaI wait the muffled oar:No harm from Him can come to meOn ocean or on shore.I know not where His islands liftThere fronded palms in air;I only know I cannot driftBeyond His love and care."
"Yet, in the maddening maze of things,And tossed by storm and flood,To one fixed trust my spirit clings,—I know that God is good!And so beside the Silent SeaI wait the muffled oar:No harm from Him can come to meOn ocean or on shore.I know not where His islands liftThere fronded palms in air;I only know I cannot driftBeyond His love and care."
"Yet, in the maddening maze of things,And tossed by storm and flood,To one fixed trust my spirit clings,—I know that God is good!
"Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings,—
I know that God is good!
And so beside the Silent SeaI wait the muffled oar:No harm from Him can come to meOn ocean or on shore.
And so beside the Silent Sea
I wait the muffled oar:
No harm from Him can come to me
On ocean or on shore.
I know not where His islands liftThere fronded palms in air;I only know I cannot driftBeyond His love and care."
I know not where His islands lift
There fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."
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 YorkLedgerin 1867, Mr. Bonner giving him $25,000 for it.
In 1870, having resigned the editorship of theIndependent, Beecher became the editor of theChristian 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 IthinkI 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 thenfuse itwhen 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, bornof 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 atotal abstainer, both in belief and practice.... I hold that no man in healthneedsor 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 ofNew 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 dogTommy 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 learnnotto 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 laida 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 theIndependent. 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 thepassions 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 seehim 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 onThursday, 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,—
"'I heard the voice of Jesus say,Come unto me and rest.'
"'I heard the voice of Jesus say,Come unto me and rest.'
"'I heard the voice of Jesus say,Come unto me and rest.'
"'I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto me and rest.'
"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
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
On a white marble cross in Eversley churchyard, England, under a spray of the passion-flower, are the Latin words, "Amavimus, Amamus, Amabimus" (we have loved, we love, we shall love); and above them, around the cross, "God is love." Those were the words chosen by the famous preacher and author; and they were the key-note of the life of one who lived for his people.
Charles Kingsley, the son of a minister, was born at Holne Vicarage, Devonshire, England, June 12, 1819. Of his father, he wrote in 1865, "He was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said to possess every talent except that of using his talents. My mother, on the contrary, had a quite extraordinary practical and administrative power; and she combines with it, even at her advanced age (seventy-nine), my father's passion for knowledge, and the sentiment and fancy of a young girl."
From his father, Charles seems to have inherited his love of art, natural history, and athletic sports; from his mother, his love of poetry and romance, and the force and originality which made him a marked character in his town and nation.
When four years of age, he used to make a pulpit in his nursery, arrange the chairs for a congregation, and preach as follows, his mother taking down the words unobserved: "It is not right to fight. Honesty has nochance against stealing. We must follow God, and not follow the Devil; for if we follow the Devil, we shall go into that everlasting fire, and if we follow God, we shall go to heaven." His poems at this time were remarkable for a child.
He studied and loved nature, and delighted in sunsets, rocks, flowers, and the wonders of the sea. At Clovelly, whither the rector had moved his family, Charles found great delight in the study of shells, and in the company of the warm-hearted fishermen. But for this early association, it is probable that the beautiful song of the "Three Fishers" would never have been written.
When the lad was twelve years old he was sent, with his brother Herbert, to a preparatory school at Clifton, under the Rev. John Knight. Here he showed an affectionate and gentle nature, only excited to anger when the servant swept away the precious shells and grasses collected in his walks on the Downs.
Afterwards he and Herbert were sent to the grammar school at Helston, which was in charge of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here he became the intimate friend of Richard Cowley Powles, afterwards fellow and tutor of Exeter College, Oxford.
Mr. Powles wrote of his friend later, "Of him, more than of most men who have become famous, it may be said, 'The boy was father of the man.' The vehement spirit, the adventurous courage, the love of truth, the impatience of injustice, the quick and tender sympathy, that distinguished the man's entrance on public life, were all in the boy.... For botany and geology he had an absolute enthusiasm.... He liked nothing better than to sally out, hammer in hand and hisbotanical tin slung round his neck, on some long expedition in quest of new plants, and to investigate the cliffs within a few miles of Helston, dear to every geologist."
"In manner," says the Rev. Mr. Coleridge, "he was strikingly courteous, and thus, with his wide and ready sympathies and bright intelligence, was popular alike with tutor, schoolfellows, and servants."
Kingsley always regretted that he did not go to school at Rugby, as he thought nothing "but a public school education would have overcome his constitutional shyness."
The Kingsley family removed to Chelsea when Charles was seventeen, and he became a day student at King's College. Two years later, in 1838, he went to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he stood first in classics and mathematics at the examinations. For his prize he selected a fine edition of Plato in eleven volumes.
In the summer of 1839, July 6, when he was twenty, he met Fanny, daughter of Pascoe Grenfell, whom he afterwards married. "That was my real wedding-day," he said years later. At that time his mind was full of religious doubt, and he was far from happy. The young lady proved a most valuable intellectual and spiritual helper; and after two months of companionship, when he returned to Cambridge, she loaned him many books and wrote him letters which proved a life-long blessing. Carlyle's "French Revolution" had a great effect upon his mind, in establishing his belief in God's righteous government of the world; also Maurice's "Kingdom of Christ," to which he said he owed more than to any book he had ever read.
Young Kingsley was at this time robust in health, able to walk from Cambridge to London, fifty-two miles,starting early and reaching the latter city at nineP.M.For many years he delighted in a country walk of twenty or twenty-five miles.
In 1841, after the struggle through which most persons pass before deciding upon a life-work, he gave himself to the ministry, rather than to the law, for which his name had been entered at Lincoln's Inn. He wrote to Fanny, June 12,—
"My birth-night. I have been for the last hour on the seashore, not dreaming, but thinking deeply and strongly, and forming determinations which are to affect my destiny through time and through eternity. Before the sleeping earth, and the sleepless sea and stars, I have devoted myself to God; a vow never (if He gives me the faith I pray for) to be recalled."
After taking honors at Cambridge, and reading for Holy Orders, he began to write the life of his ideal saint, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, for his intended wife, if, indeed, he should ever win her.
The curacy of Eversley was offered him, and he accepted it at twenty-three. The fir-trees on the rectory lawn were a great comfort. He wrote to Fanny, "Those delicious self-sown firs! Every step I wander they whisper to me of you, the delicious past melting into the more delicious future."
But from the opposition of friends the correspondence was broken, and for a year the hard parish work was carried on alone. In his parting letter to her he says, urging her to practise music, "Music is such a vent for the feelings.... Study medicine.... I am studying it.... Make yourself thoroughly acquainted with the wages, wants, and habits and prevalent diseases of the poor, wherever you go....
"I have since nine this morning cut wood for an hour; spent an hour and more in prayer and humiliation ... written six or seven pages of a difficult part of my essay; taught in the school; thought over many things while walking; gone round two-thirds of the parish visiting and doctoring, and written all this." ...
The young curate lived in a thatched cottage, and found a remedy for his loneliness in hard work. The church services had been neglected, and the ale-houses were preferred on Sunday to the house of worship. There were no schools for the children worthy of the name, and the minister had to be teacher as well as preacher.
Finally the long silence was broken, and Kingsley wrote again to his Fanny, "I have been making a fool of myself for the last ten minutes, according to the world's notion of folly; for there have been some strolling fiddlers under the window, and I have been listening and crying like a child. Some quick music is so inexpressively mournful. It seems just like one's own feelings,—exultation and action, with the remembrance of past sorrow wailing up.... Let us never despise the wandering minstrel!... And who knows what tender thoughts his own sweet music stirs within him, though he eat in pot-houses and sleep in barns!"
Again he wrote, looking forward to the home they would some time have together, "We will hunt out all the texts in the Bible about masters and servants, to form rules upon them.... Our work must be done by praying for our people, by preaching to them, ... and by setting them an example,—an example in every look, word, and motion; in the paying of a bill, the hiring of a servant, the reproving of a child."
He carried out his Christian principles in his relationswith his employees. At his death all the servants in his house had lived with him from seventeen to twenty-six years.
Early in 1844 Kingsley, then twenty-five, was married to the woman he loved, and the curate became the rector at Eversley. The house was damp, from the rain flooding the rooms on the ground floor, and the land required much drainage. But the happy husband was full of energy, and set to work to make the place habitable and attractive.
At once the young preacher established among the laborers a shoe-club, coal-club, loan-fund, and lending-library. A school for adults was held at the rectory three nights a week all through the winter; a class in music; a Sunday-school met there every Sunday morning and afternoon; and in the outlying districts weekly lectures were held at the cottages for the aged and feeble. None of the grown-up men and women among the laborers could read or write, and the minister became their devoted teacher. He taught them to love the nature he loved,—the flowers, trees, birds, and ever-changing sky. He visited the poor, the sick, and the dying, and soon became the idol of his people. He fed their minds as well as their souls; he knew, as so few really know, the all-important work which the pastor has committed to his hands. No wonder that London and England, and America finally, heard of this model preacher, and came to love him.
The year after his marriage, 1845, was saddened by the death of his brother, Lieut. Gerald Kingsley, in Torres Straits, on board Her Majesty's ship Royalist. All the officers and half the crew died of fever. His brother Herbert had died of heart-disease in 1834, when they were boys together at school.
The drama of "St. Elizabeth" was now finished; and in 1847 the young preacher started for London, on a serious mission,—to find a publisher. He read the poem to his noble friend, Mr. Maurice, who wrote a preface for it; and to Coleridge, who gave him a commendatory letter to a publisher. The poem met the usual fate,—declined with thanks.
He wrote his wife, "I am now going to Parker's in the Strand. I am at once very happy, very lonely, and very anxious. How absence increases love! It is positively good sometimes to be parted, that one's affection may become conscious of itself, and proud and humble and thankful accordingly." ...
Later he wrote to Mr. Powles, "'St. Elizabeth' is in the press, having been taken off my hands by the heroic magnanimity of Mr. J. Parker, West Strand, who, though a burnt child, does not dread the fire. No one else would have it."
Having earned a little money by extra Sunday services at Pennington, he took his wife and his two small children, Rose and Maurice, for a six weeks' holiday to the seaside, near the edge of the New Forest. Here, revelling in the scenery, he wrote several ballads.
When the drama "The Saints' Tragedy" was published, it was fiercely attacked by the High Church party at Oxford. In Germany it was read and liked, and Chevalier Bunsen wrote heartily in praise of it.
When Kingsley, now twenty-nine, went for a few weeks to Oxford, to visit his friend, Mr. Powles, Fellow of Exeter, he received much attention on account of his book. He wrote to his wife, "They got up a meeting for me, and the club was crowded with men merely to see poor me, so I found out afterwards: very lucky thatI did not know it during the process of being trotted out. It is very funny and new.... Froude gets more and more interesting. We had such a conversation this morning!—the crust is breaking, and themancoming through that cold, polished shell. My darling babies! kiss them very much for me."
The parish work at Eversley increased month by month. A writing-class for girls was held in the empty coach-house, and a cottage school for infants was begun. He wrote his first article forFraser's Magazineon Popery. He preached to his congregation on the topics of the day,—emigration, and the political and social disturbances of the time. He was, in fact, what a preacher should be,—a leader of the people.
He accepted the professorship of English literature and composition at Queen's College, Harley Street, of which Mr. Maurice was president, and went up to London once a week to lecture. He became the devoted friend of Thomas Hughes, author of "School Days at Rugby;" of Bishop Stanley of Norwich and his distinguished son, Dean Stanley, and of many others.
During this year, 1847-48, on account of great distress among the people, there were riots in London and in other large cities. The troops were called out under Wellington to disperse the Chartists, who demanded a "People's Charter" from Parliament, with more rights for the laborers.
Kingsley threw himself heartily into the conflict. He wrote a conciliatory letter to the "Workmen of England," which was posted up in London.
"You say that you are wronged. Many of you are wronged, and many besides yourselves know it. Almost all men who have heads and hearts know it—above all,the working clergy know it. They go into your houses; they see the shameful filth and darkness in which you are forced to live crowded together; they see your children growing up in ignorance and temptation, for want of fit education; they see intelligent and well-read men among you, shut out from a freeman's just right of voting; and they see, too, the noble patience and self-control with which you have as yet borne these evils. They see it, and God sees it."
And then he urges them "to turn back from the precipice of riot, which ends in the gulf of universal distrust, stagnation, starvation.... Workers of England, be wise, and then youmustbe free; for you will befitto be free."
For four years, 1848-52, he wrote for three periodicals,Politics for the People,The Christian Socialist, and theJournal of Association.
Many friends and relations begged him to desist from fighting the battles of the people, as such sympathy "was likely to spoil his prospects in life." But he wrote his wife in reference to this matter, "I will not be a liar. I will speak in season and out of season. I will not shun to declare the whole counsel of God.... My path is clear, and I will follow in it. He who died for me, and who gave me you, shall I not trust Him through whatsoever new and strange paths He may lead me?"
He always felt "that the party-walls of rank and fashion and money were but a paper prison of our own making, which we might break through any moment by a single hearty and kindly feeling."
In the autumn of 1848, while writing "Yeast," a novel which was first published inFraser's Magazine, doing the work at night, when his other duties werefinished and the house was still, he broke down, and for months was unable to do more than walk along the seashore and gather shells, even conversation being too exhausting for him.
Friends came to show their sympathy and fondness for the great-hearted man—among them Mr. Froude, who met Charlotte, the sister of Mrs. Kingsley, and married her.
Returning to the work at Eversley, where a low fever had broken out among the people, and where it was almost impossible to obtain nurses, Kingsley cared for the sick, watching all night with a laborer's wife, the mother of a large family, that she might receive nourishment every half-hour, and soon broke down again, and was obliged to go to Devonshire.
On his return to Eversley, cholera had once more appeared in England, and early and late he carried on a crusade against dirt and bad drainage.
As his means were limited, he usually took two or more pupils to fit them for the ministry; and now began his "Alton Locke," the autobiography of a tailor and a poet, in the interest of workingmen. "God grant," he says in the preface, "that the workmen of the South of England may bestir themselves ere it be too late, and discover that the only defence against want is self-restraint." He urges that they "organize among themselves associations for buying and selling the necessaries of life, which may enable them to weather the dark season of high prices and stagnation, which is certain, sooner or later, to follow in the footsteps of war."
To write this book, he got up at five every morning and worked till breakfast, devoting the rest of the day to his sermons, his pupils, and the various schools andsocieties of his parish. "His habit," says his wife, in her life of Kingsley, "was thoroughly to master his subject, whether book or sermon, always out in the open air,—in his garden, on the moor, or by the side of a lonely trout stream; and never to put pen to paper till the ideas were clothed in words.... For many years his writing was all done by his wife, from his dictation, while he paced up and down the room."
When "Alton Locke" was finished, the old difficulty of finding a publisher began. Messrs. Parker, who had brought out "Yeast," which had caused much theological discussion, refused to take another book. Finally, through the influence of Carlyle, Messrs. Chapman & Hall were induced to bring it out.
The press, as in the case of "Yeast," was severe on "Alton Locke;" but brave Thomas Carlyle wrote Kingsley to "pay no attention at all to the foolish clamor of reviewers, whether laudatory or condemnatory."
Kingsley's correspondence increased day by day. One person wrote about going over to the Romish Church; another about his atheistic doubts; another desired to reform his life; and others asked advice on almost numberless matters.
To an atheist, who was later converted under Kingsley, he wrote, "As for helping you to Christ, I do not believe I can one inch. I see no hope but in prayer, in going to Him yourself, in saying, Lord, if Thou art there, if Thou art at all, if this all be not a lie, fulfil Thy reputed promises, and give me peace and a sense of forgiveness."
Kingsley would say to his wife, as a letter was answered, or another chapter of a book finished, "Thank God, one more thing done!—and oh, how blessed it willbe when it is all over, to lie down in that dear churchyard!" The work of the great world, with all its sorrows, had tired Kingsley at thirty-two.
"Hypatia," one of the novels which will last for centuries, was begun in 1851. He writes to the Rev. Mr. Maurice in January, "If I do not use my pen to the uttermost in earning my daily bread, I shall not get through this year.... My available income is less than £400. I cannot reduce my charities, and I am driven either to give up my curate or to write; and either of these alternatives, with the increased parish work, for I have got either lectures or night school every night in the week, and three services on Sunday, will demand my whole time."
As to "Hypatia," he writes, "My idea in the romance is to set forth Christianity as the only really democratic creed, and philosophy, above all, spiritualism, as the most exclusively aristocratic creed."
In October he writes to a friend, "'Hypatia' grows, little darling, and I am getting very fond of her."
When the book was published in 1853, two years after it was begun, it aroused most bitter criticism from a portion of the English Church. But no adverse criticism could prevent its being read and loved by the people of two continents. Thirty years later it had gone through thirteen editions.
Our own Whittier wrote Mrs. Kingsley, after her husband's death, "My copy of his 'Hypatia' is worn by frequent perusal, and the echoes of his rare and beautiful lyrics never die out of my memory. But since I have seenhim, the man seems greater than the author.... His heart seemed overcharged with interest in the welfare, physical, moral, and spiritual, of his race. I wasconscious in his presence of the bracing atmosphere of a noble nature. He seemed to me one of the manliest of men."
No man could have drawn that masterful picture of the beautiful maid of Alexandria, philosopher, mathematician, teacher, and leader of her time, who had not the greatest reverence for woman, and a belief in her marvellous power. Such a man could never limit the sphere of woman by any human barriers. He said to a friend that his aim was, in every book he wrote, to set forth "woman as the teacher, the natural, and therefore divine, guide, purifier, inspirer of the man."
One learns to love the brilliant Hypatia, as did the monk, Philammon, and the Jew, Raphael Aben-Ezra, and shudders when she is torn in pieces about the age of forty by the mob.
The book holds one spell-bound from beginning to end, and many another copy besides that of Whittier "is worn by frequent perusal."
Mr. C. Kegan Paul, the London publisher, was staying at the home of the Kingsleys when much of "Hypatia" was written. "I was struck," he says, speaking of the author, "not only with his power of work, but with the extraordinary pains he took to be accurate in detail. We spent one whole day in searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there, and which was found there at last." "When I have done 'Hypatia,'" he writes Mr. Ludlow, "I will write no more novels. I will write poetry—not as a profession, but I will keep myself for it; and I do think I shall do something that will live. I feel my strong faculty is that sense ofform, which, till I took to poetry, always came out in drawing, drawing; but poetry is the truesphere, combining painting and music and history all in one."
"At that time," says a friend, "in his books and pamphlets, and often in his daily, familiar speech, he was pouring out the whole force of his eager, passionate heart in wrath and indignation against starvation wages, stifling workshops, reeking alleys, careless landlords, roofless and crowded cottages.... No human being but was sure of a patient, interested hearer in him. I have seen him seat himself, hatless, beside a tramp on the grass outside of his gate in his eagerness to catch exactly what he had to say, searching him, as they sat, in his keen, kindly way with question and look."
About the time of the opening of the Great Exhibition, so dear to the heart of the noble Prince Albert, Kingsley was asked to preach a sermon to workingmen in a London church near by, which he did with great sympathy and tenderness. Just as the blessing was to be pronounced, the clergyman who had invited Kingsley rose and remarked that it was his painful duty to say that he believed much of what Mr. Kingsley had said "was dangerous and untrue."
Kingsley, wounded beyond expression, quietly left the church, and a riot of the workmen was with difficulty prevented. That night in his sadness and exhaustion he wrote that immortal song of the "Three Fishers," which seemed to soothe and rest him.
"Three fishers went sailing out into the west,Out into the west as the sun went down:Each thought of the woman who loved him the best,And the children stood watching them out of the town;For men must work and women must weep,And there's little to earn, and many to keep,Though the harbor bar be moaning.Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.But men must work and women must weep,Though storms be sudden and waters deep,And the harbor bar be moaning.Three corpses lay out on the shining sands,In the morning gleam as the tide went down;And the women are weeping and wringing their hands,For those that will never come back to the town.For men must work and women must weep,And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep,And good-by to the bar and its moaning."
"Three fishers went sailing out into the west,Out into the west as the sun went down:Each thought of the woman who loved him the best,And the children stood watching them out of the town;For men must work and women must weep,And there's little to earn, and many to keep,Though the harbor bar be moaning.Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.But men must work and women must weep,Though storms be sudden and waters deep,And the harbor bar be moaning.Three corpses lay out on the shining sands,In the morning gleam as the tide went down;And the women are weeping and wringing their hands,For those that will never come back to the town.For men must work and women must weep,And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep,And good-by to the bar and its moaning."
"Three fishers went sailing out into the west,Out into the west as the sun went down:Each thought of the woman who loved him the best,And the children stood watching them out of the town;For men must work and women must weep,And there's little to earn, and many to keep,Though the harbor bar be moaning.
"Three fishers went sailing out into the west,
Out into the west as the sun went down:
Each thought of the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work and women must weep,
And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.
Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.But men must work and women must weep,Though storms be sudden and waters deep,And the harbor bar be moaning.
Three wives sat up in the lighthouse tower,
And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down;
They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower,
And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown.
But men must work and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden and waters deep,
And the harbor bar be moaning.
Three corpses lay out on the shining sands,In the morning gleam as the tide went down;And the women are weeping and wringing their hands,For those that will never come back to the town.For men must work and women must weep,And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep,And good-by to the bar and its moaning."
Three corpses lay out on the shining sands,
In the morning gleam as the tide went down;
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands,
For those that will never come back to the town.
For men must work and women must weep,
And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep,
And good-by to the bar and its moaning."
The winter and spring of 1854 were spent at Torquay, Mrs. Kingsley having become ill from the damp rectory at Eversley. Mr. Kingsley also had become worn in mind and body from the constant attacks of the religious press against his supposed liberal views. He and his children passed happy days along the seashore, gathering specimens to send to the scientist, Mr. H. P. Gosse, in London, and collecting materials for his articles in theNorth British Reviewon "The Wonders of the Shore." Before leaving Torquay he made a list of about sixty species of Mollusks, Annelides, Crustacea, and Polypes found on the shore, nearly all new to him.
In February he made his first visit to Scotland, to deliver before the Philosophical Institute at Edinburgh four lectures on the "Schools of Alexandria." He writes to his wife, "The lecture went off well. I was dreadfully nervous, and actually cried with fear up in my room beforehand; but after praying I recovered myself, and got through it very well, being much cheered and clapped."
When his wife was saddened on account of debts incurred through illness, Mr. Kingsley cheered her with his brave heart. "To pay them," he said, "I have thought, I have written, I have won for us a name which, please God, may last among the names of English writers.... So out of evil God brings good; or, rather, out of necessity He brings strength ... and the meanest actual want may be the means of calling into actual life the possible but sleeping embryo of the very noblest faculties."
In the winter of 1851 Kingsley wrote "Brave Words to Brave Soldiers," several thousand copies of which were distributed among the suffering soldiers before Sebastopol in the Crimea; also his novel, "Westward Ho!"
Many letters of appreciation came after the publication of this book. A naval officer wrote from Hong Kong, "Among the many blessings for which I have had to thank God this night, the most special has been for the impressions produced by your noble sermon of 'Westward Ho!' Some months ago I read it for the first time, then sailed on a long cruise; and now on returning have read it again with prayer that has been answered, for God's blessing has gone with it."
Kingsley gave lectures in London before the Working Men's College, and a series to women interested in laborers. To the latter he said, "Instead of reproving and fault-finding, encourage. In God's name encourage! They scramble through life's rocks, bogs, and thorn-brakes clumsily enough, and have many a fall, poor things!"
As to teaching boys, he said, "It will be a boon to your own sex, as well as to ours, to teach them courtesy,self-restraint, reverence for physical weakness, admiration of tenderness and gentleness; and it is one which only a lady can bestow.... There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in the heart of every untutored clod."
In the summer of 1856, when he was thirty-seven, Kingsley spent a happy vacation with Mr. Thomas Hughes and Mr. Tom Taylor at Snowdon, Wales, which resulted in the writing of "Two Years Ago."
In June, 1857, Kingsley writes to his friend Thomas Hughes, "Eight and thirty years old am I this day, Thomas, whereof twenty-two were spent in pain, in woe, and vanities, and sixteen in very great happiness, such as few men deserve, and I don't deserve at all.... Well, Tom, God has been very good to me.... The best work ever I've done has been my plain parish work."
Diphtheria, then a new disease in England, appeared at Eversley. "Some might have smiled," says Mrs. Kingsley, at seeing her husband "going in and out of the cottages with great bottles of gargle under his arm."
The earnest preaching, the lectures, the books and correspondence, continued. Many guests came now to Eversley,—Harriet Beecher Stowe and others from America, where his literary work seemed at first more appreciated than at home; Miss Bremer, the Swedish novelist, who after she went home sent him Tegnèr's "Frithiof's Saga," with this inscription: "To the Viking of the New Age, Charles Kingsley, this story of the Vikings of the Old, from a daughter of the Vikings, his friend and admirer, Fredrika Bremer."
Dean Stanley came; Max Müller also, and spent the first week of his married life at the rectory—he hadmarried a beloved niece of Kingsley's, the G. to whom he wrote the poem,—