Miss Eliza Rotch had come from her English home shortly before my going to New Bedford, and had brought, with her English education and sense, more than the ordinary English powers of conversation. She, like all her family, had been bred in the Friends' Society; and she came with many of them to my church. She was a most remarkable hearer. With her bright face, and her full, speaking eye, and interested especially, no doubt, in the new kind of ministration to which she was listening, she gave me her whole attention, often slightly nodding her assent, unconsciously to herself and unobserved by others. She married Professor John Farrar of Harvard, and [69] able mathematician, and one of the most genial and lovable men that ever lived. Life, in our quiet little town, was more leisurely than it is in cities, and the consequence was an unusual development of amusing qualities. There was more fun, and I ventured sometimes to say, there was more wit, in New Bedford than there was in Boston. To be sure, we could not pretend to compare with Boston in culture and in high and fine conversation, least of all in music, which was at a very low ebb with us. I remember being at an Oratorio in one of our churches, where the trump of Judgment was represented by a horn not much louder than a penny-whistle, blown in an obscure corner of the building! Charles H. Warren was the prince of humorists among us, and would have been so anywhere. Channing said to me one day, "I want to see your friend Warren; I want to see him as you do." I could not help replying, "That you never will; I should as soon expect to hear a man laugh in a cathedral." I never knew a man quite so full of the power to entertain others in conversation as he was. Lemuel Williams, his brother lawyer, had perhaps a subtler wit. But the way Warren would go on, for a whole evening, letting off bon-mots, repartees, and puns, made one think of a magazine of pyrotechnics. Yet he was a man of serious thought and fine intellectual powers. He was an able lawyer, and, placed upon the bench at an uncommonly, early [70] age, he sustained himself with honor. I used to lament that he would not study more, that he gave himself up so much to desultory reading; but he had no ambition. Yet, after all, I believe that the physical organization has more to do with every man's career than is commonly suspected. His was very delicate, his complexion fair, and his face, indeed, was fine and expressive in a rare degree. The sanguine-bilious, I think, is the temperament for deep intellectual power, like Daniel Webster's. It lends not only strength, but protection, to the workings of the mind within. It is not too sensitive to surrounding impressions. Concentration is force. Long, deep, undisturbed thinking, alone can bring out great results. I have been accustomed to criticise my own temperament in this respect, too easily drawn aside from study by circumstances, persons, or things