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Samuel Foster Haven.
Assistant Surgeon 15th Mass. Vols. (Infantry), August 5, 1861; Surgeon, July 21, 1862; killed at Fredericksburg, Va., December 13, 1862.the subject of this sketch was born in Dedham, Massachusetts, in the house of his grandfather, the Hon. Samuel Haven, May 20, 1831. His father, S. F. Haven, Esq. has been for many years librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, at Worcester. His mother was the daughter of the Rev. Freeman Sears of Natick, Massachusetts, who died early in life, after a brief settlement in that place. She died when Foster was not quite five years old. Fortunately, at that tender age, the friend from whom his mother, an orphan, had received her intellectual and moral culture, in the most important period of her life, extended to him the same kind care, and watched over his early development with equal interest and affection. Whatever elevated and generous sentiments it is possible to cultivate in the mind of a child, she labored to implant or nurture. She kept a journal of her experiences in the process of guiding and enlightening his spontaneous mental operations, which evinces her devoted affection, and has a striking moral and metaphysical significance. The wide circle of the friends and acquaintances of this lady (Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody) will readily understand how every intellectual germ which could be nourished into a principle of devotion to duty or chivalrous self-sacrifice or heroic aspiration would receive an impulse and a direction from her hand which could never be wholly lost; and in this case the noble fruition of the life of her pupil bears ample testimony to the success of her early cultivation. The details of the life of a child are, perhaps, applicable to a notice of his maturity only in the general way of showing the influence of early training on his more developed character and actions. And in this connection it may be appropriately
