* Amzi Chapin has left, apparently, nothing more than the record of his birth, March 2, 1768, and the memory of his tune. It appeared as early as 1805.
Elder Leland was a remarkable revival preacher, and his prayers—as was said of Elder Jabez Swan's fifty or sixty years later—“brought heaven and earth together.” He traveled through the Eastern States as an evangelist, and spent a season in Virginia in the same work. In 1801 he revisited that region on a curious errand. The farmers of Cheshire, Mass., where Leland was then a settled pastor, conceived the plan of sending “the biggest cheese in America” to President Jefferson, and Leland (who was a good democrat) offered to go to Washington on an ox-team with it, and “preach all the way”—which he actually did.
The cheese weighed 1450 lbs.
Elder Leland died in North Adams, Mass., Jan. 14, 1844. Another of his hymns, which deserved to live with his “Evening Song,” seemed to be answered in the brightness of his death-bed hope:
O when shall I see Jesus
And reign with Him above,
And from that flowing fountain
Drink everlasting love?