I remember, in connection with Samuel Johnson, collecting an audience for Mr. A. B. Alcott, the most adroit soliloquizer I ever listened to, who delivered in a vestry-room a series of those remarkable "conversations"--versations with the _con_ left out--for which he was celebrated. It was, in many respects, a happy time. V. THE CRISIS IN BELIEF. I was in Salem when this came. It happened in the following way: A woman in my choir, a melancholy, tearful, forlorn woman, asked me one day if I knew Theodore Parker. I said I did not, but then, seeing her disappointment, I asked her why she put that question. She replied that her husband had abandoned her some months before and with another woman had gone to Maine. There he had left the woman and was living in Boston, and was a member of Mr. Parker's Society; and she thought that if I knew Mr. Parker I might find out something about him, and perhaps induce him to come back to Salem. I told her I was going to Boston in a day or two, and would see Mr. Parker. My visit, again and again repeated, resulted in an intimacy with that extraordinary man which had a lasting effect on my career. His personal sympathy, his profound humanity, his quickness of feeling, his sincerity, his courage, his absolute fidelity of service, even more than his astonishing vigor of intellect and his earnestness in pursuit of truth, made a deep impression on my mind. To be in his society was to be impelled in the direction of all nobleness. He talked with me, lent me books, stimulated the thirst for knowledge, opened new visions of usefulness. As I recall it now, his influence was mainly personal, the power that comes from a great character. He communicated a moral impetus. Faith in man, love of liberty in thought, institution, law, breathed in all his words and works. His theological ideas were somewhat mixed, as was inevitable then. His gift of spiritual vision, especially as shown in his interpretation of the Old-Testament narratives, may have been imperfect; his moral perspective may have been incomplete; his learning was copious, rather than discerning. But his single-mindedness was perfect, and his devotion to his fellow-men was almost superhuman. It was a privilege to know such a man, so simple-hearted and brave. The slight disposition to put himself on his omniscience, to strike an attitude, was not strange considering his enormous force, his consciousness of power, his singular influence over men, and his conviction (in large measure forced on him by his advocates) that he was a religious reformer, a second Luther, the inaugurator of a new Protestantism. His three doctrines, to which he constantly appealed, and in proof of which he adduced the testimony of the human soul,--the existence of a personal God, the immortality of the individual, and the absoluteness of the "moral law" might have been untenable in the presence of modern knowledge under the form in which he stated them. His