form, of his own nature and affections, and | but an ungenial nurse. His father, a lawawaken in every reader, an autobiographical yer in full practice, and barely able to do interest. The Memoir is but the prolonged note yet lingering in our ear from the receding tones of his own voice. It is all the more sweet and welcome for that; only, with its special aids from memory and love, it need not have been struck on so many instruments, and thrown into such elaborated chords.

justice to the claims of his large family, followed rather the usages of the time than the kindliness of his nature, in keeping his children at a respectful distance. His mother, of whom a good deal is said without leaving a very distinct impression, seems to have seen a shrewd and lively woman, using the license of a good conChanning's life beginning in 1780, was science with something of the sharpness of almost coincident with the independence of a censor, and with more of the strength to his country. No sooner was the sovereignty conquer troubles, than of the sweet art to of Great Britain shaken off, than a series of smooth and charm them. Though Wilconsiderable men were ordered upon the liam,-the third child,--is said to have stage, as if to inaugurate the new republic, been an idol from the first," this seems and enrich it with the elements of a civili- to imply rather admiration of his lovelization specially its own. Adams was ready ness, than sympathy with the peculiar ento secure it the honor of statesmanship; dowments of his nature: for his mind eviStory, to create its jurisprudence; Allston, dently followed a solitary course, and was its art; and Channing, its moral literature. never domesticated with the influences Colonial life indeed is not favorable to pro- around it, except with the wild sea-beach fessional eminence and intellectual pur- and shaded glens of the island. Of his suits and a society sufficiently advanced nature, it was a law that nothing should to supply its highest offices from its own have power over him, except on condition citizens approaches the termination of its of its being beautiful and being good: and colonial existence. Such men ensure the he was thrown by birth upon a society, of era of self-government: and self-govern- which one half appears to have been gross ment again favors the appearance of such and profane, the other stiff-necked and men. The immediate period of transition Puritanical, with the free heart all on one however, at which Channing was born, side, and the dutiful will upon the other. though propitious to the ambition of grown Both of them necessarily acted as repulsions men ready to occupy the field, was not fa- to him, the genial spirit without purity, vorable to the training of his first years. and the dull habits of religion without its To the Revolution he owed it, that, in his ideality. He was like a poet-child doomed manhood, he could speak to two nations ;- to live with a Franklin, and eat the dry that, in his childhood, he was poorly cared powder of his precepts as antidote against for by one. Times of political anxiety and the poisons of the world. It is no wonder convulsion are unfriendly to home life. that his mind was early driven inwards The current interests are pitched too high upon itself; was led to seek in books its for its tranquillity. The topics of table- first taste of genuine sympathy; and found talk are not light enough for young and a kindling joy in the stern but noble commirthful lips. Children are in the way; panionship of the Stoical moralists. From and being once fed, dressed, protected, and the many traces of a gentle and generous sent off to church or school, are otherwise ig-boyhood, we select the following anecdote, nored. A generation whose cradle has been related by himself:rocked by revolution may work its way up to strength and self-subsistence; but with great suffering to the gentler and more dependent spirits. They open best in a time of peace and evenness, when children are the ornaments of home, the measure of duty, the refreshment of care, the symbols of hope. Such was the nature of William Ellery Channing and, notwithstanding the sterling worth of his parents and connections, it is impossible not to feel that in the notions and ways prevalent in the society of Newport, Rhode Island, he found

“I can remember an incident in my childhood which has given a turn to my whole life and cha racter. 1 found a nest of birds in my father's field, which held four young ones. They had no down when I first discovered them. They opened their little mouths as if they were hungry, and I gave them some crumbs which were in my pocket. Every day I returned to feed them. As soon as bread, and sit by the nest to see them eat, for an hour school was done, I would run home for some at a time. They were now feathered, and almost ready to fly. When I came one morning, I found them all cut up into quarters. The grass round the nest was red with blood. Their little limbs

were raw and bloody. The mother was on a tree, The peculiarity in Channing, indicated and the father on the wall, mourning for their by these incidents, is not that he thus felt young. I cried myself, for I was a child. and thought; but that he never parted thought too that the parents looked on me as the author of their miseries, and this made me still with his faith in such impulses, or allowed more unhappy. I wanted to undeceive them. I them to be laughed or worn away. Unwanted to sympathize with and comfort them. spoiled childhood is always humane, always When I left the field, they followed me with their truthful: but there are few who do not eyes and with mournful reproaches. I was too learn to slight the divine guidance of nature young and too sincere in my grief to make any when the thronged and beaten track of apostrophes. But I can never forget my feelings. custom leads away. The impression will never be worn away, nor can I ever cease to abhor every species of inhumanity towards inferior animals."-I. 37.

In the following narrative, the mirror is held up to the early experience of many a thoughtful mind; and an insight gained into the many gradations of unreality by which the passage is treacherously smoothed from perfect veracity of heart to utter pre

tence :

The career of Channing's parents was most unequal. He was only thirteen when the father died; the mother survived for 37 years of widowhood,-the object of faithful care and affection to William and

his elder brother Francis. After a year's preparatory study, William entered Harvard University in 1794; residing during his academical course, with his uncle, Chief Justice Dana. His life had no more genial period than the four years spent at college. "His father, with the view of giving him a ride, Not that there was any thing ennobling in took William in his chaise one day, as he was the methods of study and discipline pecugoing to hear a famous preacher in the neighbor- liar to the place; for the Professors seem hood. Impressed with the notion that he might to have been a set of formal officials, little learn great tidings from the unseen world, he able to conciliate the pedantic decorum of listened attentively to the sermon. With very the receding age with the fervid spirit of a glowing rhetoric, the lost state of man was described, his abandonment to evil, helplessness, de- new time. Nor was it that the tone of pendence upon sovereign grace, and the need of feeling among the general body of underearnest prayer as the condition of receiving this graduates was by any means high; for the divine aid. In the view of the speaker, a curse disorganizing principles of French philososeemed to rest upon the earth, and darkness and phism were telling with full effect on the horror to veil the face of nature. William, for his faith and conduct of the students. But to part, supposed that henceforth those who believed would abandon all other things to seek this salva- a pure and thoughtful mind, nothing can tion, and that amusement and earthly business prevent the College years from being a would no longer occupy a moment. The service glorious time. The large drafts of knowover, they went out of the church, and his father, ledge at the moment of most eager thirst; in answer to the remark of some person, said, with the first trial of the wings of thought out of a decisive tone,—Sound doctrine, Sir.' It is all sight of the home-nest and high amid the true, then,' was his inward reflection. A heavy mountain air; the fervid friendships weight fell on his heart. He wanted to speak to his father; he expected his father would speak to true and good; the fair perspective, changspringing from a common trust in what is him in relation to this tremendous crisis of things. They got into the chaise and rode along, but, ab- ing with the ideal colors, of promised and sorbed in awful thoughts, he could not raise his still promissory years; these give an unvoice. Presently his father began to whistle! At conscious splendor to that time, seldom length they reached home; but instead of calling revealed but by the advent of a paler light the family together, and telling them of the appall-in our maturity. The affection of classing intelligence which the preacher had given, his mates such as Story, Tuckerman, and Allfather took off his boots, put his feet upon the mantelpiece, and quietly read a newspaper. All things went on as usual. At first he was surprised; but, not being given to talking, he asked no explanations. Soon, however, the question rose, Could what he had heard be true? No! his father did not believe it; people did not believe it! It was not true! He felt that he had been trifled with; that the preacher had deceived him;

and from that time he became inclined to distrust

everything oratorical, and to measure exactly the meaning of words; he had received a profound lesson on the worth of sincerity."-I. 32.

ston; the re-unions of the Shakspearesociety and the Speaking-club; the discussion of great questions in history and philosophy, to which European movements seemed to give an immediate practical interest,--were sufficient, independently of the direct studies of the place, to afford an invaluable discipline to a mind like Channing's. The direction of his nature, now left free, early declared itself; as the following confession which he had afterwards

the courage to make, will sufficiently ex-fected him. Hutcheson, Butler and Price plain :

"The two authors who most served to guide his thoughts at this time, were Hutcheson and Ferguson. It was while reading, one day, in the former, some of the various passages in which he asserts man's capacity for disinterested affection, and considers virtue as the sacrifice of private in terests and the bearing of private evils for the public good, or as self-devotion to absolute universal good, that there suddenly burst upon his mind that view of the dignity of human nature, which was ever after to uphold and cherish' him, and thenceforth to be the fountain light of all his day, the master light of all his seeing.' at the time, walking as he read, beneath a clump of willows yet standing in the meadow a little north of Judge Dana's. This was his favorite retreat for study, being then quite undisturbed and private, and offering a most serene and cheerful prospect across green meadows and the glistening river to the Brookline hills. The place and the hour were always sacred in his memory, and he frequently referred to them with grateful awe. seemed to him that he then passed through a new spiritual birth, and entered upon the day of eternal peace and joy."

He was,

echoed this personal feeling; Ferguson applied it to Society: and these authors powerfully influenced him. But nothing is more striking than the exceedingly slight trace apparent in him of all his other reading, not only at College, but during his whole subsequent period of study. He is said to have made himself familiar with Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Hartley, Priestley, and Stewart. Of these writers it is just conceivable that Locke, Reid, and Stewart, might pass before a mind of sound capacity with no other result than that of tranquil and inconspicuous instruction. But that the startling paradox of Berkeley, the cruel ease of Hume's sport with highest truth, the relentless mechanism of Hartley's philosophy, should create no agitation, and constitute no era, for a clear and earnest mind, is just matter of astonishIt ment. These authors usually shake the whole fabric of the young philosopher's world. The questions which they stir, and the element of thought in which they move, lie so deep, that the ultimate bases of belief heave and tremble at their power; nor is it easy to conceive how stability should be restored, without many a vestige of internal strife subdued. In Channing, however, no reader would suspect more than the most ordinary and hearsay acquaintance with the works of these great thinkers: and confines of the two spheres of thought you would say that if ever he crossed the which they divide, he must have been carried blindfold or asleep. The same apparent inoperativeness may be observed in his historical and classical pursuits. They resulted in no scholarship or critical skill, though sufficiently extensive to have left most perceptible effects of this kind on an understanding differently constituted. The truth is, we imagine, that the intensity of the moral sentiment within him absorbed every thing into itself; and made his reflective activity wholly predominant over the apprehensive; and determined it in one invariable direction. He meditated where others would have learned; and the materials of his knowledge disappeared, as fast as they were given, in the large generalizations of his faith. His mind thus grew, while his attainments made no show; and while he missed the praise of learning, he won an affluence of wisdom. Now and then we meet with a mind presenting the direct antithesis to this; in which acquisition takes place by external accretion,

"The glory of the Divine disinterestedness, the privilege of existing in a universe of progressive order and beauty, the possibilities of spiritual destiny, the sublimity of devotedness to the will of Infinite Love, penetrated his soul; and he was so borne away in rapturous visions, that, to quote his own words, as spoken to a friend in later years, I longed to die, and felt that if heaven alone could give room for the exercise of such emotions; but when I found I must live, I cast about to do something worthy of these great thoughts; and my enthusiasm at that age, being then but fifteen, turning strongly to the female sex, I considered that they were the powers which ruled the world, and that if they would bestow their favor on the right cause only, and never be diverted by caprice, all would be fitly arranged, and triumph was sure. Animated with this view which unfolded itself with great rapidity and in many bearings, I sat down and wrote to this lady, laying his hand on his wife's arm, who was listening by his side,-'But I never got courage to send the letter, and have it yet." "-1. 62.

This outburst of enthusiasm, awakened by the writings of Hutcheson, lets us at once into the secret of his moral doctrine, and leaves no room for surprise that he always felt an unconquerable aversion for the Utilitarian Ethics. The point of departure for his whole philosophy was his own unresolved and, as he believed, irresolvable moral consciousness; the intensity of which was the determining cause of his characteristic beliefs and experience. Only in so far as they addressed themselves to this, do books or events appear to have sensibly af

rather than internal fusion; and immense | South, the political sympathy, prevailed; stores of producible erudition are accumu- carrying with it, in each case, a distinctive lated, without the least progress or change system of opinions as to internal affairs as in the nature of the possessor. It is a well as foreign relations. Considerable inmarvellous phenomenon,-a man assiduous-roads were made upon Channing's Federalist ly sweating in the richest mines of knowledge prejudices at this time. Without losing yet with utmost success, remaining poor as his abhorrence of " French principles," he before; and, with whole histories, philoso- did not suffer them to weaken his confiphies, archæologies in his head, being still dence in the great experiment of self-goas puerile in conception, as narrow in reason, vernment; and he condemned the Alien as sterile in affection, as if he had never and Sedition Laws as acts of arbitrary and had contact with foreign speech and an- unworthy fear. The impressions, however, of cient wisdom. These two appearances,delight in the society of Richmond, under of a mind growing greater without visible which this change was wrought, do not apacquisition; and of one remaining small pear to have been lasting. Kindly and under infinite accessions,-are alike curious grateful words indeed drop from him still. to the thoughtful observer of mankind. But he saw beneath the gloss of fashionaTo the happy and generous College pe- ble manners, and was often shocked by riod succeeded two years, the record of what he found. He felt the constant which fills us with unspeakable sadness. presence of slavery, and was sickened by He went, under the name of tutor, to reside its corruptions. He discovered the univeron the estate of Mr. Randolph, of Rich-sal prevalence of irreligion, and the conmond, Virginia. He had the charge of sequent ascendency of low aims and sordid twelve boys, to whom he devoted the great-ambition. He met with no response to his er part of the day. The remaining hours own pure tastes and aspirations. He withleft to his own disposal, were differently used by him at different periods of his stay. At first, under the attraction of a new position and with his fresh confiding spirit still unchecked, he seems to have enjoyed the society frequenting the planter's hospitable table; to have acknowledged the charm of the free and genial manners characteristic of the South; and to have been pleasantly roused by the democratic politics of the place, to reconsider the Federalist opinions he had brought from New England. The collision between his own prepossessions and the sentiments which he heard advocated in the debates of the Virginian legislature, gave the final form to his political convictions. The French Revolution, in its operation on American society, awakened two opposite tendencies. To the citizens of the young confederation it was flattering that their example should be so speedily followed, and a Republic be constituted by the most polished nation of the European continent; and the resemblance in the fates of the two countries seemed to prescribe alliance between the Governments. To the descendants of the Pilgrim-fathers however, the impudent atheism of France was pecu-ed to think how dark it looked within. In liarly offensive; and so degraded by its alliance the sacred doctrine of the Rights of man, that they were anxious to keep distinct the basis of their own liberties. In the North, this religious apathy; in the

drew almost wholly into his remote study, and limited himself to the companionship of his books. These silent associates afforded an inadequate check to the inordinate activity of his own emotions; and he lapsed into an ascetic enthusiasm: the pinch of poverty and the resolve of Stoicism conspired to lay him low, and fasten to him the chain of incurable infirmity. He denied himself his needful food: he slept upon the floor: he made the clothes already threadbare in the summer, serve amid the winter winds. In his recoil from the careless world around him, and his passionate aspiration after perfection, he retired further into himself. As his body became enfeebled, and his mind dizzy with its own intensity, study passed into meditation; meditation, into revery; and revery, into the sorrows of self-reproach. He rose into a delusion which is peculiar to lofty minds, and presents the paradox of excessive selfknowledge overbalancing itself into self-ignorance. Consumed by wasting fires of emotion, he charged himself with utter apathy, and burst into tears of humiliation. He had gazed at the burning focus of his nature, till he was blind; and then shudder

truth, it is given to no man to estimate the quantities of his nature: only into its qualities does God permit him to have insight. Good and evil affections belong to the whole family of minds, and are just

objects of accurate discrimination. But to I ever struggled with my whole soul for purity, gauge the temperature of spirits is a task truth and goodness, it was there. There, amidst beyond us; for there is no common measore trials, the great question, I trust, was settled within me, whether I would obey the higher or sure to furnish a true scale; and the freez-lower principles of my nature,-whether I would ing-point of angels may be a white heat to be the victim of passion, the world, or the free meu. In a letter to a College friend, writ-child and servant of God. It is an interesting reten at this time, Channing says: