COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS TROW DIRECTORY NEW YORK BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH The He LEWIS FRENCH STEARNS was born at Newburyport, Mass., on March 10, 1847. His father was the Rev. Jonathan French Stearns, then pastor of the Federal Street Presbyterian Church in that ancient town. maiden name of his mother was Anna S. Prentiss. was the second of three children. The eldest, Seargent Prentiss Stearns, Consul-General at Montreal under President Arthur, is now living in that city, and his sister Annie is the wife of Dr. Austin Scott, President of Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N. J. He had good reason to rejoice in his parentage. It made him heir, along several lines, to the oldest and best religious life of New England. On his father's side it allied him with a ministerial family noted through successive generations for admirable personal qualities, piety, and wide influence. Dr. O. W. Holmes, in his poem "The SchoolBoy," described it as a saintly race that never could, On his mother's side he inherited some of the pleasantest, as well as worthiest, memories of Cape Cod and the Old Colony, and of Maine, in the eighteenth and first third of the nineteenth century. All the roots of his being ran back into the rich Puritan and Pilgrim soil of the seventeenth century. In the autumn of 1849 his father accepted a call to the First Presbyterian Church of Newark, N. J. Here Lewis spent his boyhood, and this was the home of his student years. Newark at that time was a leading centre, in New Jersey, of Presbyterianism, as also of social culture, professional talents, public spirit, and successful manufacturing industries. Its history was full of honored names. The First Church especially abounded, both then and through all its previous annals, in men prominent alike in Church and State. It was a good environment for the growth of solid virtues. And Lewis showed, while still a child, a keen susceptibility to the best influences about him. He was marked, even as a little boy, by striking individual traits. The observing eye of his aunt, the author of "Stepping Heavenward," was early attracted to him, and he soon won her special affection-an affection that ripened into a life-long friendship. Her letters contain frequent allusions to him. Here is a passage from one to his mother, dated Newark, August 14, 1851. Lewis was then four and a half years old, and his aunt occupied the parsonage, while his parents were absent on a journey: All is going on well at your house. Luly is perfectly well and the very best of boys, and you would smile to see him in his papa's place at the breakfast-table, while I occupy yours, each of us as grave as a judge. He comes up every morning and waits on me down to breakfast, looking as neat as a pink. A few weeks later, in another letter, she pictures him as bursting with joyous excitement and racing "like mad," with a little cousin, up and down a Sound steamer. His brother thus depicts some of his traits as a boy and a student: His first real preparation for college began at the Newark Academy, then, as now, the leading school in Newark. Here he |