A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward BeecherScoville, Samuel
Religion
A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
Scoville, Samuel
Beecher, Henry Ward, 1813-1887
“We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it
in the snow. I got out of the carriage, and took the little coffin in my
arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I
saw the winter down at the very bottom of it. The coffin was lowered to
its place, and I saw the snowflakes follow it and cover it, and then the
earth hid it from the winter.
“If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time
I thought of it. It seemed to me then as though I had not only lost my
child, but buried him in eternal snows. It was very hard for faith or
imagination to break through the physical aspect of things and find a
brighter feeling.”
The attachment which his people felt for him was more than reciprocated.
He always loved to recall these early years and in memory live over
again their joys and sorrows, their struggles and triumphs.
In the early winter of 1877, in the course of a Western lecture trip,
revisiting Indianapolis, he wrote back:
“I went to Indianapolis in the fall of 1849 with a sick babe in my arms,
who showed the first symptoms of recovery after eating blackberries
which I gathered by the way. The city had then a population of four
thousand. At no time during my residence did it outreach five thousand.
Behold it to-day with one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants! The
Great National Road, which at that time was of great importance, since
sunk into forgetfulness, ran through the city and constituted the main
street. With the exception of two or three streets there were no ways
along which could not be seen the original stumps of the forest. I
bumped against them in a buggy too often not to be assured of the fact.
“Here I preached my first _real_ sermon; here, for the first time, I
strove against death in behalf of a child, and was defeated; here I
built a house and painted it with my own hands; here I had my first
garden and became the bishop of flowers for this diocese; here I first
joined the editorial fraternity and edited the _Farmer and Gardener_;
here I had my first full taste of chills and fever; here for the first
and last time I waded to church ankle-deep in mud and preached with
pantaloons tucked into my boot-tops. All is changed now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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