When moving out of a house I have always been in the habit, after everything was gone, of going into each room and bidding it a mute farewell. There are the rooms named after the different members of the family. I suppose it is so in all households. It was so in mine; we named the rooms after the persons who occupied them. I moved from the house of my boyhood with a sort of mute affection for its remembrances that are most vivid in its hours of crisis and meditation. Through all the years that have intervened there is no holier sanctuary to me than the memory of my mother's vacant chair. I remember it well. It made a creaking noise as it moved. It was just high enough to allow us children to put our heads into her lap. That was the bank where we deposited all our hurts and worries.
Some time ago, in an express train, I shot past that old homestead. I looked out of the window and tried to peer through the darkness. While I was doing so, one of my old schoolmates, whom I had not seen for many years, tapped me on the shoulder, and said: "DeWitt, I see you are looking out at the scenes of your boyhood."
"Oh, yes," I replied, "I was looking out at the old place where my mother lived and died."
I pass over the boyhood days and the country school. The first real breath of life is in young manhood, when, with the strength of the unknown, he dares to choose a career. I first studied for the law, at the New York University.
New York in 1850 was a small place compared to the New York of to-day, but it had all the effervescence and glitter of the entire country even then. I shall never forget the excitement when on September 1st, 1850, Jenny Lind landed from the steamer "Atlantic." Not merely because of her reputation as a singer, but because of her fame for generosity and kindness were the people aroused to welcome her. The first $10,000 she earned in America she devoted to charity, and in all the cities of America she poured forth her benefactions. Castle Garden was then the great concert hall of New York, and I shall never forget the night of her first appearance. I was a college boy, and Jenny Lind was the first great singer I ever heard. There were certain cadences in her voice that overwhelmed the audience with emotion. I remember a clergyman sitting near me who was so overcome that he was obliged to leave the auditorium. The school of suffering and sorrow had done as much for her voice as the Academy of Stockholm.
The woman who had her in charge when a child used to lock her in a room when she went off to the daily work. There by the hour Jenny would sit at the window, her only amusement singing, while she stroked her cat on her lap. But sitting there by the window her voice fell on a listener in the street. The listener called a music master to stand by the same window, and he was fascinated and amazed, and took the child to the director of the Royal Opera, asking for her the advantages of musical education, and the director roughly said: "What shall we do with that ugly thing? See what feet she has. And, then, her face; she will never be presentable. No, we can't take her. Away with her!" But God had decreed for this child of nature a grand career, and all those sorrows were woven into her faculty of song. She never could have been what she became, royally arrayed on the platforms of Berlin and Vienna and Paris and London and New York, had she not first been the poor girl in the garret at Stockholm. She had been perfected through suffering. That she was genuinely Christian I prove not more from her charities than from these words which she wrote in an album during her triumphal American tour:
In vain I seek for rest
In all created good;
It leaves me still unblest
And makes me cry for God.
And safe at rest I cannot be
Until my heart finds rest in Thee.
There never was anyone who could equal Jenny Lind in the warble. Some said it was like a lark, but she surpassed the lark. Oh, what a warble! I hear it yet. All who heard it thirty-five years ago are hearing it yet.
I should probably have been a lawyer, except for the prayers of my mother and father that I should preach the Gospel. Later, I entered the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Why I ever thought of any other work in the world than that which I have done, is another mystery of my youth. Everything in my heredity and in my heart indicated my career as a preacher. And yet, in the days of my infancy I was carried by Christian parents to the house of God, and consecrated in baptism to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but that did not save me. In after time I was taught to kneel at the Christian family altar with father and mother and brothers and sisters. In after time I read Doddridge's "Rise and Progress," and Baxter's "Call to the Unconverted," and all the religious books around my father's household; but that did not save me. But one day the voice of Christ came into my heart saying, "Repent, repent; believe, believe," and I accepted the offer of mercy.
It happened this way: Truman Osborne, one of the evangelists who went through this country some years ago, had a wonderful art in the right direction. He came to my father's house one day, and while we were all seated in the room, he said: "Mr. Talmage, are all your children Christians?" Father said: "Yes, all but De Witt." Then Truman Osborne looked down into the fireplace, and began to tell a story of a storm that came on the mountains, and all the sheep were in the fold; but there was one lamb outside that perished in the storm. Had he looked me in the eye, I should have been angered when he told me that story; but he looked into the fireplace, and it was so pathetically and beautifully done that I never found any peace until I was inside the fold, where the other sheep are.