plan in the usual style of landscape garden work, streaked with meandering dabs of green paint indicative of anticipated foliage. Colonel Lee, who had his reasons for being interested in the matter, possessed himself of one of these expansive documents with its dreams of umbrageous forest trees, glades and dells and general boskiness. It was impressive, yet it failed to commend itself to his skilled eye. Thereupon he had recourse to his favorite game, played with bits of pasteboard cut upon a scale and representing trees, groves and shrubs of the average size; these he laid upon Mr. Olmsted's plan, with the result that they so overlapped each other, and so encroached upon walks and roadway, that it was obvious that the park must be at least two stories high to accommodate such a sylvan display. The consequence of this demonstration was the abandonment of the romantic scheme and the adoption of the present system.

CHAPTER VII

ATTITUDE TOWARDS RELIGION SUNDAY OCCUPATIONS-DEATH

In his amusing and extravagant way Colonel Lee used occasionally to allege that any New Englander who was not a Unitarian must have some defect in his intellectual make-up. Of course he himself was of that creed; indeed, how could he have been otherwise amid the entourage of all those Lees, Jacksons, Cabots and Higginsons, pillars of that faith, absorbing with reverence every word spoken by the apostolic William Ellery Channing, and most ingenuously bigoted in their revolt against bigotry. He was puzzled and indignant that anyone should still accept the stern and hateful doctrines which the old-time divines had bequeathed to New England. On the other hand he was not at all disturbed that one should cast aside all creeds and almost all beliefs. It was the only instance in his life when he seemed careless of dramatic proprieties, for a man of his personal appearance ought to have been seen regularly every Sunday performing all the obeisances and genuflections demanded by the Anglican ritual; he would have been a fine and striking figure in a congregation of High Church Episcopalians; the only excuse for him is that in his early days the churches of this creed were in a very embryonic stage in Boston,

having not yet been taken up by the fashionable set. In his way, however, he was really devout, at least as devotion goes among Unitarians; he was a church-goer, and often of a Sunday, when kept at home by some cause, he would read a sermon to the family circle, and read it so well, too, that they listened with some pleasObviously he would have emphatically denied any assertion that he was not as believing a Christian as the most strict of his orthodox neighbors. At a dinner given to his friend, Frederick H. Hedge, D.D., December 12, 1885, he said:

ure.

"Timidity and disingenuousness are not the characteristics of Unitarian divines, rather of those who are unfortunately hampered by a creed. But something more than freedom from disingenuousness; a bluff, downright utterance of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, characterized Dr. Hedge's preaching.

"The sight of a huge, soft-wooded, open-grained, rapid-growthed silver poplar with its pale bark, its sprawling grandeur, asserting its place among the slowgrowthed, close-grained, hard-wooded hickories and beeches and oaks, irritates me and I long to have it felled. So, when I am constrained to listen to the wellturned sentences of a comely, flabby, sonorous utterer of commonplaces or of borrowed thoughts, I am tempted, as was a humorous friend of mine, impatient of the preternaturally soft and solemn talk of her minister, to say 'devil! devil! devil!' But when a man who has read and thought and felt much pours out for me the lesson. of his sweet and bitter experience, in words which burn

that lesson into my mind and heart, then I am instructed and refreshed."

It was largely through the efforts of Mr. Lee that the use of the Music Hall was secured for Theodore Parker, when that quasi-divine was preaching on Sundays a sort of secular sermon which shocked the good Unitarians about as much as they themselves shocked the good orthodox. The story cannot now be recovered in exact form, but the purport was that a majority of the proprietors of the hall, then newly constructed, were strongly opposed to permitting it to be used in this manner. Prominent in this majority was Mr. Lee's own caustic and formidable uncle, Mr. Thomas Lee. But Mr. Lee, who owned only one share, by a speech in which he ridiculed the idea of managing a hall on sentimental grounds, routed the majority, and thereafter the people of the "new light," the "come outers," gathered regularly on the sacred day to listen to the profane addresses of a very good and a very eloquent

man.

So also in the early days, when Ralph Waldo Emerson was still anathema for all Christians save the most advanced Unitarians, Mr. Lee had anticipated the feeling of later years towards him. He once delivered at Divinity Hall an address on "The Ministry as Viewed by a Layman," in which he said:

"The gradual transition from liberalism to conservatism is as natural, as inevitable, as the gradual transition from spring to fall, from the strength and freshness of youth to the feebleness and dryness of age. The Unitarian clergymen, who a few years before had been

denounced by their Calvinistic brethren as radicals and skeptics, were now presiding over parishes filled with the wealthiest and most eminent citizens.

"The attitude of the church on slavery, temperance and other social and political questions, was more calculated to win the approval of their prosperous and prudent parishioners than to raise it in the esteem of sincere and enlightened Christians. They had moved the old fences further along, so as to include their own followers among accepted Christians, and were now, as boundary commissioners, resting from their labors and contemplating with serene self-satisfaction the excellent worldly and spiritual condition of the community enfolded within their liberal domain.

"Suddenly roused from their placid, not to say drowsy, condition by the attempts of some young presumptuous persons to move or climb the fences so carefully fixed by themselves, they assumed the old position of their Calvinistic brethren, and became rebukers instead of defenders of freedom of thought, confident that they had established the scientific boundary between liberty and license, between well-considered and illconsidered reform. This movement forward would have taken place had Emerson never lived. It was as irresistible as the movement of the glacier. But Emerson's influence in promoting and regulating it was very great.

"Combining hereditary piety with openness of mind and rare common sense, his outlook was that of a poet, and at the same time of an acute, practical New Englander, steering with unerring instinct between stupid