One of them had, apparently, from early childhood, a passion for books and learning and sophistication and cultivation--and gregarious, articulate social existence--and dinner parties and black broadcloth and white linen and good wine--and all the other elements in the sort of life which is not to be found on Vermont farms. The Vermont farm, however, seems to have presented him with some tools for getting what he wanted: a powerful great body, an active mind and an unlimited amount of dynamic energy. He left home at sixteen (this was about 1833) spurred on by the sympathy of a strong-minded mother. I have still in the attic of his old house, the little hair-covered trunk which he took with him, and which contained all his worldly possessions. From that time on, until his old age, he never came home except to rest in the occasional, very brief intervals of incessant and almost appalling activity, both intellectual and physical. With only a little help from his family he earned his way through college, and then put himself through a Theological Seminary in record time. With him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages, turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off. All his life he burned hot with a vitality at which an ever-widening circle of other human beings, rich and poor, young and old, learned and ignorant, warmed their hands and their hearts. Even the people whom he furiously rubbed the wrong way (he had as many enemies as friends) were stimulated by the friction to a quicker life-pace, a livelier circulation. The temperature in a room rose when he entered it. Even people of sluggish, scholarly, dilettante temperaments, even coldly superior and skeptical people who prided themselves on being too disdainful of life to lift an eyebrow over its issues, soon kindled either to intense exasperation or lively personal affection. In either case, calm and ease and torpidity of life were scorched and shaken. I have often thought with sympathy of the vestrymen in Grandfather’s various parishes.