The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss

Character. The Fervor o

. Bright, natural Tra

nal Gift. Love to Chr

ll the best qualities of New England character. Not a few of the early settlers had come from Cape Cod and other parts of the old Bay State, and the blood of the Pilgrim Fathers ran in their veins. Among its leading citizens at that time were such men as Stephen Longfellow, S

ing, Essex Co., England. Among his fellow-passengers in the Hopewell was Mary Eliot, then a young girl, sister of John Eliot, the illustrious "Apostle to the Indians." Some years later she became his wife. Their youngest son, Samuel, was father of the Rev. Phillips Payson, who was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1705, and settled at Walpole, in the same State, in 1730. He had four sons in the ministry, all, like himself, graduates of Harvard College. The youngest of these, the Rev. Seth Payson, D.D., Mrs. Prentiss' grandfather, was born September 30, 1758, was ordained and settled at Rindge, New Hampshire, December 4, 1782, and died there, after a pastorate of thirty-seven years, February 26

last year of his life she lavished upon him her love and her prayers. The relation between them was very beautiful. His letters to her are models of filial devotion, and her letters to him are full of tenderness, good sense, and piou

m in certain features of his character he bore no little resemblance, Edward Payson was of a melancholy temperament and subject, therefore, to sudden and sharp alternations of feeling. While he had great capacity for enjoyment, his capacity for suffering was equally great. Nor were these native traits suppressed, or always overruled, by his religious faith; on the contrary, they affected and modified his whole Christian life. In its earlier stages, he was apt to lay too much stress by far upon fugitive "frames," and to mistake mere weariness, torpor, and even diseased action of body or mind, for coldness toward his Saviour. And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly,

ng those bright natural traits-the sportive humor, the ready mother wit, the facetious pleasantry, the keen sense of the ridiculous, and the wondrous story-telling gift-which made him a most delightful companion to young and old, to the wise and the unlettered alike. It served, moreover, to impart peculiar tenderness to his pastoral intercourse

ht of Heaven," and that addressed to Seamen. His theology was a mild type of the old New England Calvinism, modified, on the one hand, by the influence of his favorite authors-such as Thomas à Kempis, and Fenelon, the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century, John Newton and Richard Cecil-and on the other, by his own

Could I paint a true likeness of Him, methinks I should rejoice to hold it up to the view and admiration of all creation, and be hid behind it forever. It would be heaven enough to hear Him praised and adored. But I can not

s soul in harmony with it-the most apt illustrations would flow from his lips, the fire of devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only could he deliver a sermon fr

poured themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring affection. When he said, "Let us pray," a divine

rt of rude fall, to open them again, when he had concluded, and find myself still on the earth. His prayers always took my spirit into the immediate presence of Christ, amid the glories of the spiritual world; and to look round again on this familiar and comparatively misty earth was almost painful. At every prayer I heard him offer, during the seven years in which h

ered in recalling what he had once read or seen, easy self-control, and ardent sympathies, all conspired to give him this preeminence. Without effort or any appearance of incongruity he could in turn be grave and gay, playful and serious. This came of the utter sincerity and genuineness of his character. There was nothing artificial about him; nature and grace had full play and, so to say, constantly ran into each other. A keen observer, who knew him well, both in private a

ness of feeling that disarmed prejudice and sometimes won the most determined foe. Even in administering reproof or rebuke there was the happiest union of tact and gentleness. "What makes you blush so?" said a reckless fellow in the stage, to a plain country girl, who was r

imself to the study of divinity under his father's care. He was licensed to preach in May, 1807, and a few months later received a unanimous call to Portland, where he was ordained in December of the same year. On the 8th of Ma

st be Christ's; He has purchased me dearly, and I should hate the mother who bore me, if she proved even the innocent occasion of drawing me from Him. I feared that you would do this. For a little time the conflict of my feelings was dreadful beyond description. For a few moments I wished I had never seen you. Had you been a right ha

rget them all in the greatness of his spiritual joy. In a letter written shortly after his death, Mrs. Payson gives a touching account of the tender and thoughtful concern for her happiness which marked his last illness. Knowing, for example, that she would be compelled to part with her house, he was anxious to have a smaller one purchased and occupied at once, so that his presence in it for a little while might make it seem more home-like to her and to her children after he was gone. "To tell you (she adds) what he w

icant rill, that may be crossed at a single step, whenever God shall give permission. The Sun of Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float like an insect in the beams of the sun, exulting yet almost trembling while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, wit

What is written concerning his Lord and Master might with almost literal tru

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