James Langdon Hill

“ When a person rises one's first thought is, There, that's the motion of the spirit, the inner witness. It is the responsive factor in us that makes the Quaker doctrine take hold. They have an Inward Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. A friend, a lady with a serene, intelligent, illumined face, fluent and correct in expression, with most engaging modesty, moved by the spirit, arose and spoke, with a power stronger than human genius, her understanding being opened, her heart enlarged, in a manner wonderful to herself exhorting us to take heed to the light within us. ”

“ His elegance in diction would make one's sense of beauty ache. "Honor is the substance of my story," said the imposing, uplifting man starting on his moving recital, told in his unique, felicitous style, with utterance broken by emotion, of the life and death of Miss McKeen of Abbott Academy, of whose board of trustees he had been president for thirty years. That trinity of qualities, wisdom, eloquence, and pathos, swept everything. Rhetoric cannot be shut up in a book. Its play of words, even in a sympathetic auditory, and among vibrant hearers, while it sparkles, dies. ”

“ Thus every stage of one's existence leaves him some memorial of its presence in the life of today. I did not know what large deposits I had once been making in the bank of memory. This is occasioned by the fact that a boy lives his first years more keenly alive, to the things about him, than does a man. Even our food does not later have its earlier relish. If a man thinks, that what he recalls of a thing, when absent from it, is the whole of his memory of it, he very much underestimates the fact. ”

“ You do not say of persons at rest that "they shout for joy, they also sing." After sunset, the lonely twilight hours, with Jacob, represented the accepted, needed rest and after that came the pensive reverie, the dream and with it the ladder and the angel ministration. In his own person, every one must have noticed, that after a period of rest, often as late as Sabbath afternoon, come the holy influences of the hour, the music that is audible to the fine ear of thought, the stillness, the purity, the balm. A man, who is busy all the time or tired all the time, breaks the curfew law of God. ”

“ It was a blessing to me to be well born, yet I was born with neither a gold nor a silver spoon in my mouth. My warfare has been at my own charges. While my classmates and associates were enjoying a winter vacation, I taught a country school. There is a choice spot to me. To revisit the earth without viewing that scene and unclasping, there, the book of memory would be like quitting London before one has stood within the shadowed aisles of Westminster or coming back from Italy without entering the gates of the Eternal City. ”

“ For my work, no better place could have been found beneath the all-beholding sun than this fair, expansive city, on its crescent bay, with its shore drive where the Indians once held their running matches, which has now become one of the boulevards of the world. Like the apple trees in an old New England orchard, the men were marked by individuality. They were fruitful, needed, prized, each had a place, but they were so different in the way they stood up. There were active men, gifted in speech, who had the training that came out of the old Lyceum and the Silsbee Street Debating Society. ”

“ He passed beneath an elaborate arch blazoned with words of welcome, but Lafayette relatively was unmoved. Sitting quietly with no expectation excited, before a screen in a public assembly, the curtain lifted and there stood his birthplace, in speaking beauty and suggestiveness and all the deeps of his heroic nature were broken up and he sobbed audibly like a child. The strong old home still held him to its heart.
How is such a birthplace marked? Chiefly by a gush of rich emotion in the heart of him who claims it as his own. Nature attends to that. A boy has warm affections. ”

“ Educating Themselves
I never look upon the panorama of the past where vivid life forms have lost little of their original distinctness without thinking of the village oracles who exercised their eloquence in these local, free schools of debate. They gave a permanent bias and coloring to the genius and taste and style, in all their subsequent years, to men distinguished for their talents, whom the lyceums discovered and trained, who shone splendidly in after life. To find the place of the lyceum in the evolution of the debaters, we will eliminate genius. To draw a rude likeness was once genius. ”

“ To feel that we are tethered to a place of beginning, though we live on the other side of the world, is not to say that we would like to go back there to reside. We are viewing it only as a factor in our past life. It was like the experience once of reading Whittier's Hampton Beach when there. It made past history realistic. It was like standing in the presence of the Lion of Lucerne after being indebted only to memory for your conception of its vivid character. ”

“ Species cannot be confounded, a briar will clasp a solid trunk of a tree and weave its tendrils and leaves through the branches of the pine to its top, but the briar was briar in every thorn and leaf and the pine was itself in all its green needles of which Nature makes her sweetest wind harp in the world. We are alike in the general features and attributes of body and soul. We are under similar laws, have similar wants, have a similar origin, common sympathies, and a common destiny, yet no two of us are alike. Nature never repeats itself. ”

“ Washington, the loftiest object in our Atlantic country, made more grand with our greatest name, or in which we saw Niagara, the most remarkable waterfall in the world's scenery, or in which we heard the Messiah, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, perhaps the grandest piece of music ever composed by man, would stand in a succession of days and yet stand apart from them in our memory. ”

“ Take notice that a child's birthright is freedom. When walking with his mother he seeks to unclasp his hand from hers and make a little detour in the grass along the way. His nature revolts at following, forever, when out for pleasure, a beaten path. Seeing real life reflected, you do not fail to notice, that in coasting, which in childhood could be called, The Great Joy, the girls take a prominent part, and there is no effort by the elders to play the spy nor block the sport. Here are boys and girls together, oblivious of sex, like a family, in beautiful, healthful, animating sport. ”

“ Thus a new attitude is taken by many people toward death and towards the departed. Some say they feel as close as ever to those who, though they have turned a leaf in their biography, are characters in a story that still goes on. The feature of the war has been "the thinning of the veil between life and death." Forever living, incapable of death, seems the new verdict touching those promising young men who while they paid the price, bequeathed to those who survived, the glory and the honor. ”

“ This is the teacher that is said to throw us into the deep pool, exclaiming briskly: Now, swim. Human existence is rarely a great prairie stretching monotonously onward to the great river. Blessings and misfortunes meet us in disguise. Just as in the world's history, and in the history of invention, and in our political annals, we have our great days so we do in our personal experience, when destiny turns on a pivot. If one will give a recital of the ten most memorable days of his life the rest of it would be a matter of easy inference by his hearers. ”

“ It means a great school of debate, a college that grants no degrees. It gives me a sadness that is not akin to pain, to hear a young person designate a building as Lyceum Hall, using the word as if it were Grampian Hall or Hamilton Hall, having no glorious, clear conception of what the name of the hall signified to the early community. Tradesmen, farmers, professional men, themselves readers and thinkers, above all restless and eager disputants would meet night after night to discuss the unselfish problems of life. ”

“ Nothing that ever enters into the field of experience is left unrecorded. There the record lies and I am testifying touching the place and the hour at which it is blazoned forth. It is at the spot where you point and say "There the mortal put on immortality." Her spirit hovers near us, to awaken in us, a motive to reflect back certain qualities in a remote degree upon her, in respect and blessing. In pictures we often see a pilgrim, home from his wanderings, leaning upon a staff, at such a grave. ”

“ The mind is a delicate organism. You cannot well force things. It has its own laws of suggestion. Once coming into the old surroundings, which rake up the past, standing again on a recognized corner, which carry one's thoughts back with delight into familiar haunts, the law of association will put on the tip of your tongue names and incidents that you supposed to be clean forgotten. If a person had asked me to give the name of the first barber that ever set foot in the town of my boyhood home, I would have believed it sunk in oblivion. ”

“ The flaming sword which once guarded the gates of our youthful paradise is not turned against us preventing, as in the case of our first parents, our return to our early homes, as many persons, by keeping at a distance, appear to believe. One can approach this Eden boldly. The password at the gate is Welcome. Any pilgrim like myself will have his astonishment divided between the disclosure made of his own power of recollection and of the unforeseen suggestiveness of the place, when memory faithful to her task unties her budget. ”

“ These are without the human race, but for objects of study and enthusiasm and deference I turn to those made but little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor.
Let me add another recollection of the moment, that my eyes, my ears, my whole soul seemed sometimes to be just opening upon what appeared to me a new fact that such a mother of charming character, such as I used to see, was the day-star of that apotheosis of mother which reached its climax in the last year of the German war. A nation does not know what it has until it comes to exhibit it. ”

“ In my day, everybody knew his neighbor and his neighbor was everybody. As is known of ancient Athens, at its best, quoting from an oration writer, "It is impossible for a man in this city to be of good repute or otherwise without all of us knowing it."
Even the most beautiful scenery needs absence to gain its hold upon us, and to unite a new and an old revaluation into something better than either. There is an old proverb, What is ever seen, is never seen. What is always heard, is never heard. ”

“ After reaching the big hall down town, as the lights supplied to Professor Churchill, the renowned elocutionist from Andover, seemed dim, I left the hall and went out and bought a student lamp and had a wick put in and filled it with kerosene, which if now brought into a blazing auditorium in these enlightened days would be like holding a candle to the sun. In a more significant way the city has turned from Darkness into light. ”

“ Why did the hero of Virgil, in his death hour, manifest his love for the place of his birth which is so beautifully narrated by that immortal bard? It is an instinct, which gives to it a place in the human heart, and such an expression in human thought. Like poetry it is born with us, not made. There probably is no stronger feeling in us than that of attachment to our first home. A man transplanted to another field may have succeeded well. ”

“ A graduate of Andover, on approaching the Sacred Hill, feels a disposition to manifest a like deference. Before him rises the hallowed ground. Andover is not large but there are those who love her. She was always a good mother to me. Andover on the map you can cover with your thumb, but you cannot so cover Andover. Its vital expansive influence has gone out through all the world and its words to the end of it. In an outburst of passionate eloquence, Mr. Webster once exclaimed, "What has America given to the world? It has given to the world the character of Washington." ”

“ Boys wore heavy calf-skin boots with attractive red tops, which they desired to have seen, and this foot-wear was copper-toed so that a boy could lie on his face on his sled and steer it in its swift descent of the hill, by ploughing first one toe and then the other into the icy roadway. Any one's feelings will indicate to him, that he must treat himself, and that he must be treated differently by others, when he is clad in light woolens and in thin foot-wear. He must have more civilized walks, a more even warmth in the house, and a more genteel order of life. ”

“ It is with diffidence that I name a suggestion that has been very much on my heart since retreading these streets and revisiting these early haunts. It is to get rich, not with dollars in the purse, but deposits in the bank of memory. No other human faculty can be more rapidly and strongly and surely developed than an ability to keep things in mind. Yet many people are making use of methods that impoverish recollection. Devices are increasing for memory-saving which have the effect of memory destroying. A faculty's development is arrested from want of use. ”

“ Years rise up like the steps of the Pyramids and more and more extensive becomes the review of life. How different a landscape looks when we have simply reversed our steps and are faced the other way. I must always remember it as one of the pleasures of life, that all the invisible lines that connect every later service and place of residence were set vibrating from the desk where I taught my first term of country school when I was seventeen. ”

“ There is in us a tendency to selection and preference of one human being before all others. This action of the heart is forceful and even almost irresistible to us and yet may not accord with other persons' ideas of appropriateness. This strange preference, in its early stages, and in its strength and duration, is nature's greatest sidelight upon our individuality. It is entertaining to see what people pass right by and then to see what they choose. It distinguishes itself most at the further end of a long life and seems to have an unfading quality which shows that it is nature itself. ”

“ I felt that he had a kind of genius for picking up news. Anyway he used great liberality in the diffusion of it. He was I thought a charitable reporter. While he had breathed the classic atmosphere of the place, yet all the books he had to read had been dumped there, like a sort of terminal moraine. For scholars today the whole stock would be not only a curiosity, but a relic, being little else than folios on serious subjects. They were books that must be reverenced, as members of the eldest liturgical church would reverence the bones of the blessed martyrs. ”

“ In case of peril, it is instinct in a man, to make motions in reaching out to take the lines. If a story is known to another person, it is pure nature in him on hearing it told, to show how some detail might have been better rendered. I add a fourth thing that a person wants to improve upon no matter who is handling it. If my splendid teacher were again instructing me out of a book showing the difference between memory and recollection I would have to bite my tongue to compel it to silence. I should indeed of all men be the most miserable unless I could bear testimony. ”

“ Returning from voluntary exile, to my father's house, not as a prodigal son, to make confession of sins, or of wasted patrimony or of wasted life, but to gain impressions from early places, where any boy gets the most important part of his education, seeing that it is in our youth that we lay the foundation of whatever character, position, or usefulness we later attain, I was most deeply stirred at those places that directly touch my interior life. ”

“ Not any one man, nor any group of men, but the inner spirit of the city, what I will call the genius of community life, which gives that indefinable tone that marks the city from the town, and that when amplified belongs only to an industrial assemblage of people. I attributed her phenomenal individualism, first to her unpedestaled idol, Rev. Parsons Cook, D.D., who made so much of individual work and accountability, also to her antecedents and atmosphere in which men working alone developed the contemplative habits of shoemakers. ”

“ Through Tears of Memory
There is no other such dark day as when a boy parts with his home and his native state for good, to find a home God only knows where, and the old life that meant so much to him is over. There were our friends, there was our home, and there are our graves, my father having given commandment concerning his bones. Pardon me, gentle reader, if for the moment I speak with a personal accent. An individual cannot inherit his experience. It is my feeling that it is well to know some part of the world thoroughly. "He who is everywhere is nowhere." ”

“ A country home grows tendrils around a man's heart that a house numbered with others, in a uniformly brick-faced block, fails to do. A thoroughly cultivated or built-up country is much less beloved by its people than an open one that is close to nature. A strictly fenced locality where all surfaces are exclusively appropriated, leaving only the dusty highways to the people, does not gain the attachment that we all feel for Andover, beautiful for situation. ”

“ I have attributed a remarkable escape, speaking broadly, from such deformities, such travesties on the grace of architecture, the least developed of the arts, that with pain we are forced to contemplate, to the fact that this city is conspicuously a place of the people and they will not stand for cranky, crazy fads and obsessions. At any hour for forty years, a stranger to fear, with absolute confidence I could point to buildings that it would be well enough to call perfect of their kind. ”

“ Then this sappy, beardless representative of the rising generation that I met, that I used to be, with the Aurora-spirit, had the effrontery to ask me how it happened that a man had but one youth and then came age and infirmity, while a college, like a nation, seems under favorable administration to have a re-birth and a renewal of the vitality of youth twice or even thrice. ”