ACROSS THE LAND OF THE HUSTLER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2719, 25 April 1906, Page 13

ACROSS THE LAND OF THE HUSTLER.

V.— THE HL 7 B OF THE UNIVERSE. By William Hewitsojt. I travelled from New York to Boston by rail, breaking my journey for a few hours at New Haven to have a look at Yale University. Here I met Professor G. B. Stevens, the author of several well-known works on New Testament subjects, and heard from him good reports of our young fellow townsman Mr Ernest Guthrie. Mr Guthrie, after graduating in arts at the Otago University and taking half of his divinity course in the Theological Hall of the Presbyterian Church here, proceeded to Yale for two sessions. I was glad to hear from Professor Stevens that Mr Guthrie's abilities as a student and as a speaker had commanded the attention of both the professors and students of Yale. DR CLARK. At Boston I had the pleasure of enjoying for a short time the hospitality of Dr Clark, the founder of the Christian Endeavour 'movement. Dr Clark passed through the colonies a f&w years ago, and left a pleasant memory with all who met him. His home is at Auburndale, a little out of the city of Boston, in a beautiful spot overlooking the Charles River, a favourite stream for canoeing. The house stands surrounded by trees and unfenced, as are also the houses of Dr Clark's neighbours. This American fashion of doing without fences or hedges has a look of confidence in one's neighbours and in the passers-by. It perhaps also gives to a home a greater look of hospitableness than does a 6ft iron fence or a stone wall with broken glass bottles on the top of it. Dr Clark, I am sorry io say, had a serious break-down after his return home from his ■world tour, but be was beginning to " take hold " again, as the Americans say, and was looking forward to full work at no distant date. THE KANGAROO AS A CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOURER. In Dr Clark's home there are a great many interesting curios gathered from all parts of the world, and on his office table there stands a small stuffed kangaroo from Australia. Dr Clark said jokingly that tb«"- had bcon thinking about the propriety of calling the kangaroo a Christian JUndeavourer, and taking it as an emblem of the society. The C.E. movement, I wa* told, had been going ahead by leaps an' 5 bounds. BRITISH AGGRESSION. In Boston and in its neighbourhood I was reminded more than anywhere else of colonial days in America and of the conflict between trip British and the colonists. Dr Clark's mother, a bright old lady of 80 years of age, is a descendant of a leader who fought against the British, and among her cherished possessions are several mementoes of those stirring days. She showed me. among many other* things, a beautiful piece of linen which had a paper attached to it explaining that the linen had been found in a military camp " when the British left in a hurry." At Concord, only a few miles out of Boston, we saw the sce-nes of several engagements, a statue of the Minute Man, the graves of British soldiers, and Battle Monument. It was with the strangest feelings, feelings the like of which I had never before experienced, that I stood and read the inscription on Battle Monument: — "Here, on the 19th April, 1775. was made first forcible resistance to British Aggression. On the opposite bank stood the American Militia, Here stood the invading army, and on this spot the first of the enemy fell in the War of the Eevohition, which gave Independence to these United States. In gratitude to God, and in the love of Freedom, This monument was erected, A.E. 1&36. ' As I read of "British aggression," "the invading army," "the enemy," I could not help thinking of what might have bee-n, and I wondered if the command " Thou shalt not speaJc evil of dignitaries " comes under the Statute of Limitations, and whether, afc this time of day, it would be lawful to relieve one's feelings about George 111 and some of his friends. THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. The most interesting places in and near Boston I found to be those connected with the names of the dead : the homes of her literary men and the graves of some of them in Mount Auburn, one of the most Iwautiful cemeteries in the world, and in Sleepy Hollow. Concord. The day we visited Concord was very beautiful —a day of bright sunshine, blue heavens, and brisk air. The quiet little town, with its long line of shade trees on both sides of the streets, seemed a fitting dwelling-place for Emerson, Hawthorne, and Louisa Alcott. Their homes — unpretentious wooden buildings surrounded by trees — are pointed out to the tourist In Sleepy Hollow I saw the graves of the great literary workers of Concord, marked by stones more unpretentious even than their homes, and bearing the simplest inscriptions. Hawthorne's monument, a small stone about Zft high, bears only the word " Hawthorne." Louisa May Alcott's monument is a similar stone, inscribed "L. M. A. 1832 to 1888." Emereon's grave is marked by a large boulder, on which a short inscription has been engraved. EMERSON. Most men owe something to Emerson : often it is a debt incurred early in life, and though the debt may not be increased at a later date, yet we continue to pay tribute to him all our days. Henry Drummond somewhere speaks of the beginnings it Me library— the few books that be owned

as a young man, and among them Emer- » son' 3 "Essays" and Robertson's " Ser- ! mons " occupied an honourable place. My | ea-rliest recollections of Emerson go back to my boyhood, when my timid mind began to quicken. I used to love to go to the home of one who was my own and my father's friend. I can see him yet. as he sat by the open white-washed fireplace in the back kitchen. Thj fire-irons shone in the light of the wood fire, and the whole room was as clean as plenty of soap and vigorous polishing could make it. My friend had been a working man all his days, from the time he went to the coal pit at the age of eight until he worked his last shift as a watchman at 70, no longer equal to more laborious work. He has gone, and so has his wife, who so heartily believed and practised the precept that cleanliness is next to godliness. Many years have passed, and all has changed ; but that back kitchen in the lamplight is still clear in my memory. That was my first real school. It was there that my education began ; and my old friend, as he smoked his pipe and talked about his reading and his observations of life with an incisiveness or a droll humour that I have scarasly ever heard equalled — certainly never surpassed, — was my first teacher. Emerson was often the subject of our conversation in those days, and my old friend found congenial thoughts congenially expressed in the "Essays and Orations." I remember how the " boggy ' passages used to trouble him, the parts where he could not see the connection between what went before and what followed after. One day he compared the reading of a certain essay to driving od a country road : you get places on the road of easy and smooth going, but suddenly you come upon bite where you are likely to be jolted out of the trap. I did not know then what I now suspect is the truth concerning the apparent want of consecution in the essays, that it is due to Emerson's method of composition, as that is described for us by Dr Garnett. As I stood by the grave of the Concord Sage, I thought of my old philosophical «ngine-driver friend — dead, too, now, and of the " boggy " passages. In speaking of Wordsworth's unconsciousness of bhe prosa.it> character of some of his work, Matthew Arnold sa3*s that we can imagine if anyone met Shakespeare in the E'.ysian fields and told him that some of his passages were in a strain quite false, the poefc wou'd smile and reply that he knew it perfectly well him&elf, and what did it matter I wonder som-etimes if my old friend has found out Emeison and told him that some of hip passages are very jolty, and whether Emerson's eyes smiled a slow, wise smile. By the side of Emerson lies his wife, Lilian. I quote the inscription on her grave for the sake of the fine ideal of woman it presents :—" In her youth an unusual sense of the Divine presence was granted her, and she retained through life the impress of that Divine communion. To her children she seemed. in her native a^eendencv and unquestioning- courage, a queen, a flower in e'eganee and delicacy. Her love and care for her husband and children were her first oarthly interest, but with her overflowing compassion her heart went out to the slave, the sick, and dumb creation. She remembered them that were in bonds as bound wifch them." MOUNT AUBURN. At Mount Auburn, near Boston, I saw the grave of Oliver Wend-ell Holme*, in all of whose philosophisines and sly and keen inspection into human nature there is not a caustic word — not a word that burns or stings. I found out also the last resting place of Phillips Biooks. I had soon' in the city his beautiful church, always thronged in Brooks's day by a crowd anxious to hear him as he poured forth ;n a torrent of words that was the despair of the reporters — thoughts that made men more hopeful of the g-ood in themselves and others, and more pitiful, but not more tolerant, of the evil. Brook lies by the side of his father, mother, and three brothers. A small stone marks the last resting place of each member of the family. On ' the hearistone of the bishop there is an inscription detailing the various ecclesiastical positions he occupied, and closing with the passage: ' f Hitn that overcometh will I mafce a pillar in the temple of my God." I was perhaps more intere=ted in the tombstone of the mother than that of any other member of the family group with its inscription, "0. woman, great is thy faith." She was the mother of six sons: all of them became members of the Episcopal Church of America, four of them- clergymen. one of the four becoming a bishop', the fifth was a business man, and the sixth a soldier who was shot in the war. A« she stands portrayed in the biography of her great son. I do not think I have ever soon a woman of more.yearning, maternal affection, and more compelling religious £ait>h. Time would fail me to tell of our visit to the graves of Longfellow. Lowell. a.nd others, and of the emotions that our visit excited. It was with lingering feot we made our way to the trates of the cemetery and causrht tli-e tram that carried us hack to the city. It had been for us a memorable afternoon of a. beautiful Indian summer day.