year it was! Full of active life, full of happy love, of the hardest
work, of the sweetest sleep, and the fulfilment of so many of the
fresh aspirations and dreams of boyhood! Dennis went to every
school-committee meeting, and sat through all those late wranglings
which used to keep me up till midnight and awake till morning. He
attended all the lectures to which foreign exiles sent me tickets
begging me to come for the love of Heaven and of Bohemia. He accepted
and used all the tickets for charity concerts which were sent to me.
He appeared everywhere where it was specially desirable that "our
denomination," or "our party," or "our class," or "our family," or
"our street," or "our town," or "our country," or "our state," should
be fully represented. And I fell back to that charming life which in
boyhood one dreams of, when he supposes he shall do his own duty and
make his own sacrifices, without being tied up with those of other
people. My rusty Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French,
Italian, Spanish, German and English began to take polish. Heavens!
how little I had done with them while I attended to my _public_
duties! My calls on my parishioners became the friendly, frequent,
homelike sociabilities they were meant to be, instead of the hard work
of a man goaded to desperation by the sight of his lists of arrears.
And preaching! what a luxury preaching was when I had on Sunday the
whole result of an individual, personal week, from which to speak to a
people whom all that week I had been meeting as hand-to-hand friend! I
never tired on Sunday, and was in condition to leave the sermon at
home, if I chose, and preach it extempore, as all men should do
always. Indeed, I wonder, when I think that a sensible people like
ours--really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost
days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen--should choose to
neutralize so much of their ministers' lives, and destroy so much of
their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in