the apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues of his labors that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way, as a poet: he was a born poet. Until he was five and twenty he had never learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last; but his mind was teeming with spontaneous imagery, allusion, metaphor. One might almost say of him,

'He could not ope

His mouth, but out there flew a trope!'

These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and sometimes an oddity, that was quite startling; and they were generally, but not always, borrowed from his former profession,- that of a sailor.

"One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice, that he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause, striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, "There must be something wrong somewhere! there's a storm brewing when the doves are all flying aloft ! '

"One evening in conversation with me he compared the English and the Americans to Jacob's vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew over it, and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side; but it is still the same vine, nourished from the same root!'

"On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears were startled by such a sentence as this, Grant, O Lord! that this rod of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of their souls!'

"Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!' Praying for others of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms, ‘Oh, save them! Oh, guard them! thou angel of the deep.'

"On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, 'Go heat your oven with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle

in your pocket?

teach you to swim!'

might as well put a millstone round your neck to

"He was preaching against violence and cruelty: 'Don't talk to me,' said he, 'of the savages: a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun's heat, groping in the sun's light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!'

"In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies and gentlemen and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on each side: he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other vices of more civilized life, he said emphatically, 'I don't mean you before me here,' looking at the sailors: 'I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fellows in some sort; for you profess less, not more, than you practise: but I mean to touch starboard and larboard there!' stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either side till we quailed.

"He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and missing when his ship returned to port.

"Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a mariner, steering into port through a narrow, dangerous channel, 'false lights here, rocks there, shifting sandbanks on one side, breakers on the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm, and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket.' Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true sailor-like look of defiant jollity; changed in a moment to an expression of horror as he added, See! see! she drifts to destruction!'

"One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a vessel is seen laboring in distress, and driving on a lee shore. The masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm unshipped; they spring a leak; the vessel begins to fill, the water gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper! He bent over the pulpit, repeating the last words again and again; his voice became low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with

their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget. Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, 'A life-boat! a life-boat!' Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep, impressive tone, and extending his arms, Christ is that life-boat!'"

There were less Americans of note who dwelt on the Bethel and its chief, probably because Americans of note do not write much concerning their own men. Horace Mann, in his diary, refers to him in two or three lines, commending his sincerity and his toleration, but neither describing nor quoting him.* Richard H. Dana, jun., tells, in his " Two Years Before the Mast," how the first inquiry of the far-off California sailors whom he met there was for Father Taylor. Emerson gave him a

"White marble statue in words,"

in his discourse on Eloquence, yet unpublished. Stevens, in his History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, sketches the most famous of her preachers. He says, t

These are all the references in his published diary (Life of Horace Mann): "June 4, 1837, Sunday. — Judging from external indications, what do ministers care on Monday, at a dinner-party or a jam, which way souls are sleeping? Let me always except in this city, however, Dr. Channing and good old Father Tay lor."- p. 74.

---

"July 2, Sunday. — I heard Mr. Taylor this afternoon. How wonderfully rare it is to hear a sentiment of toleration uttered by a man who cares aught about religion! A sceptic may well indorse the right of private judgment on religious subjects; for it is only an error on a topic which at least he holds to be worthless. But for one whose heart yearns toward religion, who believes it to be the 'all,' for such an one to avow, practise, feel, the noble sentiment of universal toleration, can proceed from nothing but a profound recognition of human rights and the conscientious obedience to all their requirements. Yet such is Mr. Taylor."-p. 181.

↑ History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, vol. iv. pp. 208-9.

a

"In a spacious and substantial chapel, crowded about by the worst habitations of the city, he delivered every sabbath, for years, discourses the most extraordinary, to assemblies also as extraordinary perhaps as could be found in the Christian world. In the centre column of seats, guarded sacredly against all other intrusion, sat a dense mass of mariners, strange medley of white, black, and olive, — Protestant, Catholic, and sometimes pagan, representing many languages, unable probably to comprehend each other's vocal speech, but speaking there the same language of intense looks and flowing tears. On the other seats, in the galleries, the aisles, the altar, and on the pulpit stairs, crowded, week after week, and year after year (among the families of sailors, and the poor who had no other temple), the elite of the city, the learned professor, the student, the popular writer, the actor, groups of clergymen, and the votaries of fashion, listening with throbbing hearts and wet eyes to the man whose chief training had been in the forecastle, whose only endowments were those of grace and nature, but whose discourses presented the strangest, the most brilliant exhibition of sense, epigrammatic thought, pathos, and humor, expressed in a style of singular pertinency, spangled over by an exhaustless variety of the finest images, and pervaded by a spiritual earnestness that subdued all listeners; a man who could scarcely speak three sentences, in the pulpit or out of it, without presenting a striking poetical image, a phrase of rare beauty, or a sententious sarcasm, and the living examples of whose usefulness are scattered over the seas.'

Last of all, Miss Sedgwick in her memoirs, lately published, bears testimony to his fame. In her journal, she writes,*—

"Nov. 2, 1835.-Went to hear Mr. Taylor at the Seamen's Bethel ; and there was something like what the ministrations of the Christian religion should be,- the poor, the ignorant, the neglected, taught rarely and with a glowing zeal. Such men should be the messengers of Christ : they are sent. His heart is full and his lips touched: he does not scourge his brains by midnight lamps, but comes panting with good news from his Father's house to the wandering and wayfaring chil dren."

Life of Catherine Sedgwick, p. 247.

XX.

MOTHER TAYLOR.

The Time to go up higher. The name "Mother" long held in her own Right. -Her Deep Devotion to the Common Cause.- Hears Avis Keene while attending Conference at Lynn. - Refreshed on Anniversary Week.- How she preached her First Sermon. - Visits Marblehead.-Hastens to her Husband on hearing of his Attack by Cholera. - Mention of Dr. Stevens. -An Incident in the Death of an Aged Member. - Notes her Husband's Absence from Social Meetings.-Converses about his Biography. - Her Lynn "Friends" at the Bethel. - Records Father Taylor's Reluctance to Resign. Father Merrill's Services. - Comfort in Old Age" through the dear Unitarian Friends." - Views of Ministerial Work. - Rounding the Port. Retires from Active Work. - Partial Paralysis. Still hopes to labor for the Seamen.-"Fifty-nine Years of Salvation."-"Come out from the World."- Christiana going First. - Her Orders for her Burial and that of her Husband. - In Great Distress. - Sees Heavenly Flowers.Parts with Father Taylor.-Going to a Beautiful Land. Her Remarkable Beauty. Gone! Her Funeral. Dr. Waterston's Words. - Rev. Mr. Noyes's. Her Choice Deliberate. -The Old Wav sufficient for her.-On Mount Hope.

WE have seen Tay

E have seen how happy was the beginning and continuance of the home life of Father

lor.

But every earthly beginning must have an earthly end. The time came when his companion of youth and age must go up higher. They had climbed the hill of life together. Together they must go down, " and sleep thegither at the foot." As her journal gave glimpses of her youthful experience,