Dr. Spring was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Feb. 24, 1785. His father was a minister, of whom the son says that "he would not shave his face on the Lord's day, nor allow his wife to sew a button on her son's vest; and on one occasion, when his nephew, the late Adolphus Spring, Esq., arrived in haste on a Saturday evening with the message that his father was on his bed of death, he would not mount his horse for the journey of seventy miles until the Sabbath sun had gone down." Though young Gardiner used to wonder, when a boy, why he was not allowed to participate in the customary sports of children, he seems to have preserved a warm affection for both his parents, of whom he speaks in a loving and reverential tone which we cannot too carefully respect. The thought that most affected him on their death was {130} "_that he had lost their prayers._" Gardiner was sent to Yale College at the age of fifteen, and during "a remarkable outpouring of the Spirit" upon that rather unregenerate institution, in the year 1803, he became, for a season, "hopefully pious." He had been uneasy for some time about the state of his soul, and one afternoon he resolved to pray, several hours, if necessary, until his sins were forgiven. "There," he says, "in the south entry of the old college, back side, middle room, third story, I wrestled with God as I had never wrestled before." The result of this spiritual struggle we do not profess to understand. He says that he rose from his knees without any hope that he had found mercy, yet feeling considerably relieved. For several weeks he went about, peaceful and happy, when, unluckily, the Fourth of July came, with its speeches and fireworks, and his "religious hopes and impressions all vanished as a morning cloud, and as the early dew." It was five or six years before they came back again. When he graduated his father came to hear him speak, and at the close of the exercises gave him his blessing and told him to shift for himself. So, there he was, twenty years old, with four dollars in his pocket and a profession yet to be acquired. He borrowed two hundred and fifty dollars from a generous friend, obtained a situation as precentor in a church, opened a singing school, and applied himself zealously to the study of law. Before long he married a young lady as poor as himself, and went with her in 1806 to Bermuda, where he taught school for some time very successfully; but rumors of war between this country and Great Britain drove him back to the United States, and in his twenty-fourth year he entered upon the practice of the law at New Haven. In the meanwhile those uneasy feelings of the soul, which he seems unable to analyze (though we warrant a good confessor would quickly have solved his perplexities) had not left him at peace. He writes to his father from Bermuda upon the state of his interior man: