Have you not often noticed how the man or woman whose mother died before a time that the child could recall, and whose memory clusters around a faded picture and a lock of hair—how this person is thrice blessed in that the ideal is always a shelter when the real palls? Love is a refuge and a defense. The Law of Compensation is kind: Lincoln lived, until the day of his death, bathed in the love of Nancy Hanks, that mother, worn, yellow and sad, who gave him birth, and yet whom he had never known. No child ever really lost its mother—nothing is ever lost. Men are really only grown-up children, and the longing to be mothered is not effaced by the passing years. The type is well shown in the life of Meissonier, whose mother died in his childhood, but she was near him to the last. In his journal he wrote this: "It is the morning of my seventieth birthday. What a long time to look back upon! This morning, at the hour my mother gave me birth, I wished my first thoughts to be of her. Dear Mother, how often have the tears risen at the remembrance of you! It was your absence—my longing for you—that made you so dear to me. The love of my heart goes out to you! Do you hear me, Mother, crying and calling for you? How sweet it must be to have a mother!"
One might suppose that a childless woman suddenly presented by Fate with an exacting husband and a brood of nine would soon be a candidate for nervous prostration; Sarah Porter Beecher, however, rose to the level of events, and looked after her household with diligence and a conscientious heart. Little Henry Ward was four years old and wore a red-flannel dress, outgrown by one of the girls. He was chubby, with a full-moon face and yellow curls, which were so much trouble to take care of that they were soon cut off, after he had set the example of cutting off two himself. He talked as though his mouth were full of hot mush. If sent to a neighbor's on an errand, he usually forgot what he was sent for, or else explained matters in such a way that he brought back the wrong thing. His mother meant to be kind; her patience was splendid; and one's heart goes out to her in sympathy when we think of her faithful efforts to teach the lesser catechism to this baby savage who much preferred to make mud-pies.
Little Henry Ward had a third mother who did him much gentle benefit, and that was his sister Harriet, two years his senior. These little child-mothers who take care of the younger members of the family deserve special seats in Paradise. Harriet taught little Henry Ward to talk plainly, to add four and four, and to look solemn when he did not feel so—and thus escape the strap behind the kitchen-door. His bringing-up was of the uncaressing, let-alone kind.
Lyman Beecher was a deal better than his religion; for his religion, like that of most people, was an inheritance, not an evolution. Piety settled down upon the household like a pall every Saturday at sundown; and the lessons taught were largely from the Old Testament.
These big, bustling, strenuous households are pretty good life-drill for the members. The children are taught self-reliance, to do without each other, to do for others, and the older members educate the younger ones. It is a great thing to leave children alone. Henry Ward Beecher has intimated in various places in his books how the whole Beecher brood loved their father, yet as precaution against misunderstanding they made the sudden sneak and the quick side-step whenever they saw him coming.
Village life with a fair degree of prosperity, but not too much, is an education in itself. The knowledge gained is not always classic, nor even polite, but it is all a part of the great, seething game of life. Henry Ward Beecher was not an educated man in the usual sense of the word. At school he carved his desk, made faces at the girls, and kept the place in a turmoil generally: doing the wrong thing, just like many another bumpkin. At home he carried in the wood, picked up chips, worked in the garden in Summer, and shoveled out the walks in Winter. He knew when the dishwater was worth saving to mix up with meal for the chickens, and when it should be put on the asparagus-bed or the rosebushes. He could make a lye-leach, knew that it was lucky to set hens on thirteen eggs, realized that hens' eggs hatched in three weeks, and ducks' in four. He knew when the berries ripened, where the crows nested, and could find the bee-trees by watching the flight of the bees after they had gotten their fill on the basswood-blossoms. He knew all the birds that sang in the branches—could tell what birds migrated and what not—was acquainted with the flowers and weeds and fungi—knew where the rabbits burrowed—could pick the milkweed that would cure warts, and tell the points of the compass by examining the bark of the trees. He was on familiar terms with all the ragamuffins in the village, and regarded the man who kept the livery-stable as the wisest person in New England, and the stage-driver as the wittiest.
Lyman Beecher was a graduate of Yale, and Henry Ward would have been, had he been able to pass the preparatory examinations. But he couldn't, and finally he was bundled off to Amherst, very much as we now send boys to a business college when they get plucked at the high school. But it matters little—give the boys time—some of them ripen slowly, and others there be who know more at sixteen than they will ever know again, like street gamins with the wit of debauchees, rareripes at ten, and rotten at the core. "Delay adolescence," wrote Doctor Charcot to an anxious mother; "delay adolescence, and you bank energy until it is needed. If your boy is stupid at fourteen, thank God! Dulness is a fulcrum and your son is getting ready to put a lever under the world."
At Amherst, Henry Ward stood well at the foot of his class. He read everything except what was in the curriculum, and never allowed his studies to interfere with his college course. He reveled in the debating societies, and was always ready to thrash out any subject in wordy warfare against all comers. His temper was splendid, his good-nature sublime. If an opponent got the best of him he enjoyed it as much as the audience—he could wait his turn. The man who can laugh at himself, and who is not anxious to have the last word, is right in the suburbs of greatness.
However, the Beechers all had a deal of positivism in their characters. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six, declared he would not shave until John C. Fremont was elected President. It is needless to add that he wore whiskers the rest of his life.