MEMOIR

OF

REV. EDMUND HAMILTON SEARS, D.D.

BY CHANDLER ROBBINS.

EDMUND HAMILTON SEARS was born in Sandisfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, the sixth day of April, 1810. He was a descendant from the Pilgrim, Richard Sears, who came over with the last company of the Leyden exiles, and landed at Plymouth, May 8, 1630.*

His father was a farmer in moderate circumstances, but intelligent, independent, public-spirited, of sound judgment and sturdy integrity. Though without the advantage of early education, he was fond of reading good books and had an almost passionate admiration for poetry. He was virtually the founder of the Sandisfield town library, and was honored by his fellow-citizens with various important trusts. The following notices of his character and of some of the incidents of the early life of his son are found among the papers of the latter. It is to be regretted that these autobiographical memoranda are so few:

"My memory reaches back very distinctly to the time when I was five years old, and I have some dreamy impressions of something anterior to that date. My father was then in very moderate, even straitened, circumstances. My mother was industrious and frugal, but she appreciated well the advantages of education, and always kept us at school.

My father was a man of sound judgment and very strong feeling. Though his early education was scanty, he became a man of considerable information, and had some taste for books. He had a natural love for poetry, and I have no doubt that was one of the circumstances which went to determine my tastes and pursuits. My earliest recollections are associated with his reading, or rather chanting of poetry,

The patronymic was variously spelled: Sarre, Sarres, Syer, Sayer, Scears, Seers, Sears. The last mode of spelling was adopted by the children of

Richard.

for he never read without a sort of sing-song tone. He was a great admirer of Pope's Iliad, and would read it by the hour. Sometimes when busily engaged he would break out in a chant of several lines from that poem; and the lines, —

"Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring,' &c.,

became familiar to me before I knew aught else of the Grecian hero. And the lines,

'Haste, on thy life, and fly these hostile plains,
Nor ask presumptuous what the king detains,'

became nursery rhymes, and I was afterward surprised to find them in Homer. He was also a great admirer of Watts's Lyrics, and some of them he was for ever repeating. Almost the first emotion of the sublime that was ever awakened in me was by hearing him read with great gusto one of Watts's Psalms, declaring it equal to Homer. It is the nineteenth. The original ought to inspire any translator who had but a single spark of genius. I recollect a few lines to this day, which would not out of my memory. Homer's description of Jupiter giving the nod is indeed tame in comparison, or the descent of the gods, and their taking part in the engagement, in the twelfth book of the Iliad. The following are passages of the psalm:

"To earth he came, the heavens before him bowed,
Beneath his feet deep midnight stretched her shroud:
Cherubic hosts his sun-bright chariot form,

His wings the whirlwind, and his voice the storm.
Around his car thick clouds their curtains spread,
And wrapped the conclave in a boundless shade.

"Before His path o'erwhelming splendors came,
The clouds dissolved, all nature felt the flame,
From his dread throne a voice in thunder broke,
The wide world trembled when the Eternal spoke.'

"About this time my father brought home from the library Pope's Works, in two volumes, and I was completely bewitched by the harmony of the numbers. I was just old enough to be charmed with sound without sense, and the Pastorals' I thought equal to the music of the spheres.

"Sappho to Phaon' and 'Eloise to Abélard' I thought incomparable, and would almost have given my life to have written the 'Messiah' or 'Windsor Forest.' Afterward I began to read Pope's Homer myself, and became so familiar with its contents that I could repeat whole books from beginning to end.

It

"This rhyming propensity, early waked up within me by Pope, proved a benefit to me of a kind which I was then little aware of. did not, as I then thought it would, make me immortal, but it gave me a command of the English language such as I could not have gained by being drilled, during these romantic years of boyhood, through all the Latin class-books in existence.

"In puzzling my head to find a word that rhymed, I was taking the best course to enlarge my vocabulary and acquire a graceful and nervous style. My ear became unusually quick to the harmonies of language, and I do not think I could have had a more profitable exercise in the best classical school in New England. I was mastering the English tongue, and making it flexible as a medium of thought, without any disgusting associations of crabbed lessons and pedagogues. "The most profitable works furnished me by the public library— books of history, biography, and travels were read by me with increasing interest and excited many high resolves and bright anticipations. Such books as Waldo's Lives of Perry and Decatur, and the Life of Putnam, caused many a throb of patriotism and made me quite proud of my country. But all along I had aspirations which my natural shyness would not suffer me to disclose. I actually fell to sermonizing when not more than twelve years old, and among others wrote a discourse in full from Luke xvi. 25, which I delivered to a full assembly of alder-bushes, but which no one else ever heard. My manuscripts were all carefully hidden away from the family for fear of ridicule, to which I was keenly alive. I copied Governor Brooks's message èntire and delivered it to the Legislature of both Houses assembled in imaginary conclave. I had pleadings and counter-pleadings before imaginary judges, and, in fine, there was nothing in the department of law, theology, or of poetry over which my fancy did not rove for laurels.

"But all this time I was kept steadily at work on my father's farm. My father had become engrossed in public business; my elder brother had gone South; my other brother, a year and a half older than myself, was left with me exclusively to take charge of affairs at home."

It is seldom that the circumstances which shape the character of the future man are so distinctly seen as in the case of Mr. Sears. In addition to those which are brought to view in the foregoing reminiscence, not only the pure and simple habits of the guardians and companions of his childhood (which constituted the healthful moral atmosphere which he breathed) but also the grand and beautiful scenery of his native place had a not unimportant part. The mountains, among which Sandisfield lies embosomed, especially impressed his youthful imagination. He looked upon them at first with a feeling of veneration which was afterward mingled with love. He referred to them often in conversation with evident delight, and their images frequently reappear in his writings. They were evidently associated with his early religious feelings, and seem almost to have had a subtile. connection with his youthful consecration to his Master's service. He fondly clung to their old Indian names, and regarded with indignation the proposal to substitute for them

those of distinguished men. His strong and abiding attachment to these Berkshire Hills found expression in the charming lines, written, in his old age, near the home of Wordsworth, in immediate view of the celebrated mountains. of the Lake district:

"But not less lovely or sublime

Are mountains that I used to climb;
No skyey tint of softer hue

Adorns Helvellyn's wall of blue,
Nor does the day drop sweeter smiles
On Grasmere or Winander's isles

*

Than those beneath Taghanic's eye,

Where Berkshire's vales and landscapes lie."

His physical constitution was strengthened and his prac tical ability developed by an abundance of hard work. When he was about twelve years old, he and his brother, who was two or three years his senior, took almost entire charge of the farm in the winter time beside attending school.

His first essays at poetical composition were as early as his tenth year. It is told of him, that at about that period, while working in the field, he composed two verses of poetry, writing them with chalk upon his hat, and carried them to the house. to exhibit. They were not remarkable, but the family refused to believe they were his own production unless he wrote another stanza on the spot to supplement them, which he did.

His father, with a wise discernment of his natural abilities and tastes, formed a purpose of giving him a more extended course of studies than could have been obtained at the common school. He sent him to the Westfield Academy, the nearest classical school to his own village. Having completed his preparatory studies at this institution, he entered the Sophomore class at Union College, Schenectady, then at the height of its prosperity, in 1831. With a natural thirst for knowledge, grateful to his family for having provided him, at some sacrifice, with the means of obtaining a liberal education, fully appreciating the advantages he enjoyed at the college, and habitually diligent and conscientious in the performance of duty, he devoted himself to his studies with an earnestness of purpose which secured for him the esteem of the Faculty and an honorable rank in his class. He excelled particularly in general scholarship, and as a writer he had not superior. He was a frequent contributor to a college period

* Since named Everett.

ical called "The Parthenon," and was for a time one of its editors. His poems are more vigorous and graceful than are usually found in such literature, but are chiefly interesting from the choice of subjects.. "Regarded from this point of view, some of them are not unworthy precursors of such later lyrics as Old John Brown' and the Song of the Stars and Stripes.' One of them is occasioned by a pathetic incident in the Greek Revolution, and is an arraignment of the barbarities of the Turks. Another, called "The Battle of Lexington," is a stirring appeal to arms supposed to be given the night before the battle took place. Another, bearing the title of "The Murderer's Last Hour," would indicate. that the author, like most men of ardent and generous natures, passed through a season in which he condemned the infliction of capital punishment. Another poem, written for a prize which was divided between him and another competitor, was on a Scriptural subject, "The Cities of the Plain." Such a choice of subjects gives some idea of the breadth and quickness of his moral sympathies, which made him, all his life, scorn injustice. And yet it is curious to notice that, in one of the literary reviews he furnished to the magazine, he laments that the question of slavery had led some of the most promising of our poets to abandon the purest forms of art in their protest against a great moral evil. His papers in prose are written with ease and manifest more discrimination and thought than are usually found in college magazines.*

Mr. Sears often referred to the character and influence of Dr. Nott, the president of the college, and always with warm expressions of gratitude and respect. Dr. Nott taught the Senior class in Moral Philosophy, and met them more as if they were his own children or friends than ordinary pupils. There was no conventional or formal restraint to obstruct their intercourse. Dr. Nott talked with them in a pleasant, friendly way, often intermingling his conversation with shrewd advice. His parting injunction to them, as they went forth into the world, was to take with them their Bibles and their Shakespeares, as they would find in them the sum of all wisdom.

* I am indebted for this account of Mr. Sears's writings at college to a sketch, in manuscript, of his life, prepared for the use of his family, by his son Edmund Hamilton Sears (H. C. 1874), who, in intellectual and moral traits, closely resembles his father. I am also under obligation to him for permission to make a free use of his Reminiscences whenever it might suit my purpose. I have availed myself of this permission in several instances, especially and largely in the notice of Mr. Sears's life at Wayland and Weston.