“Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held of rather a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow when she heard classes. A class in natural philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. ‘I can explain that,’ said Henry. ‘Well, you see, the sun he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.’ ‘But what makes the neap tides?’ ‘Oh! that’s when the sun stops to spit on his hands,’ was the brisk reply. “After about six months Henry was returned to his parents’ hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him, if he could only be brought to apply himself.” Of his religious life at this time we have a glimpse in a letter written by Dr. Beecher in November, 1825: “Our family concert of prayer was held in the study on Thanksgiving Day—your mother, Aunt Esther, Henry, and Charles. It was a most deeply solemn, tender, and interesting time.... Henry and Charles have both been awakened, and are easily affected and seriously disposed now. But as yet it is like the wind upon the willow, which rises as soon as it is passed over. It does not grapple, but the effect is good in giving power to conscience, and moral principle producing amendment in conduct.” This was during a revival which was then in progress in Litchfield, in which the pastor was assisted by Mr. Nettleton, the great revivalist of that period. Henry was twelve years old. That no permanent good resulted from this work appears true, as the doctor feared, but for a reason very different from that which he gives. Henry Ward himself tells us why it was: “My mother—she who in the providence of God took me to her heart when my own mother had gone to see my Father in heaven, she who came after and was most faithful to the charge of the children and the household—she often took me, and prayed with me, and read me the word of God, and expounded to me the way of duty, and did all that seemed to her possible, I know, to make it easy for me to become a religious child; and yet there have been times when I think it would have been easier for me to lay my hand on a block and have it struck off than to open my thoughts to her, when I longed to open them to some one. How often have I started to go to her and tell her my feelings, when fear has caused me to sheer off and abandon my purpose! My mind would open like a rosebud, but, alas! fear would hold back the blossom. How many of my early religious pointings fell, like an over-drugged rosebud, without a blossom!” Again, and more at length, he opens his religious experiences of the whole period: “I remember having religious impressions, distinct and definite, as early as when I was eight or nine years of age.