l>The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
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language I ever knew.
He saw to it that we were thoroughly versed in the rules, and explained the difficulties of construction of our language with great clearness, so that even I, the youngest, understood them.
His favorite exercise was parsing.
We used very different text-books then, from those now in use. Among them were Pope's “Essay on man” and Cowper's “Task,” and I remember I got my first feeling of hostility to slavery from being called upon to parse a half page beginning “Is India free, or do we grind her still?”
Our teacher taught us to construe verse,--that is, to render it into prose, so as to show the grammatical construction of the parts.
There was a sort of constructiveness about that putting of verse into prose which chimed in with my love of putting things together; and I became quite an adept.
I speak of this because an incident regarding it had an effect on my whole after life.
It had been debated whether it was not desirable that I should go to college, for my mother's most ardent desire was that I should become a Calvinist Baptist clergyman.
Ways and means were pretty narrow, and it was doubtful whether the plan could be carried out. Boys went to college in those days at the age of from twelve to fifteen. Judge Josiah G. Abbott, of Boston, one of the ablest gentlemen now at the bar, with whom I have practised for many years and know how thorough his training was, went to Harvard at twelve.1
There was an examination at our school at which all the Methodists, and other clergymen, and principal men of the vicinity were present.
The first class in parsing was called, and I, naturally in size and every way, was at The foot of it. We had “Pope's essay on man” as our text-book; for in those days there were no easy books for children,--none of the thousand treatises that have been invented since to teach children not to think, and that are at the present day, I believe, a great hindrance to intelligent education.
I remember this paragraph was the opening one of the recitation:--
1 Alas! I have lost my friend by death since this sentence was at first written.
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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