There is something broadly and deeply elemental in Dr. Eggleston’s joyous appreciation of nature, his touching love of little children, and his insight into the springs of animal life. His home habits are simple and beautiful, abounding in all the Christian graces, courtesies, and cordialities which help to maintain the ideal household. Everybody knows something of his personal appearance, if not by sight, then by report—the great bulk of frame, the large leonine head, now slightly grizzled, the deep, sharp, kindly eyes, the movements deliberate but not slow; and more, perhaps, of his conversation—precise, rapid, multifarious, swarming with ideas and the suggestions of things which the rapidity of his utterance prevents him from elaborating—original, opulent of forms, rich in quotation and allusion. And then the laugh—vast, inspiriting, uplifting. But there is such a thing as friendship becoming too friendly!

O. C. Auringer.

[Nearly a third of Dr. Eggleston’s mature life has been covered by the period since this article was written, and during this period his most finished literary work has been produced. “The Faith Doctor,” his last novel, was published in 1891; a few years later two school readers for young children, “Stories of American Life and Adventure” and “Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans” appeared. These books the author estimates highly. In 1899 “The Beginners of a Nation” was published, and in 1901 “The Transit of Civilization,”—the crowning labor of his life and the outcome of historical researches which he has been carrying on for twenty years. The year just past has been devoted to the preparation of a new school history of the United States. Dr. Eggleston’s health is unstable, and he may not continue his writing, but he has in contemplation a volume relating to life in the United States in the seventeenth century, and also a somewhat autobiographical work, not so much concerning himself as phases of life that he has seen.—Editors.]

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

EDWARD EVERETT HALE
ON ROXBURY HEIGHTS, BOSTON

The pulpit of Boston—what a fellowship of goodly names the phrase recalls! Knotty old stub-twist Cotton Mather,

“With his wonderful inkhorn at his side”;

saintly Ellery Channing; courtly Edward Everett; soaring Emerson; sledge-hammer Beecher, père; Parker, the New England Luther; golden-mouthed Starr King; mystic, Oriental Weiss; Freeman Clarke—steady old “Saint James”; Father Taylor, the Only; quaint, erratic Bartol, the last of the Transcendentalists; impetuous Phillips Brooks; and manly, practical Everett Hale. Can you measure the light they have spread around—its range, its brilliancy? The Christian pulpit of Boston has been a diadem of light to half the world. It has been distinctively not an ecclesiastical, but a patriotic, educational, and intellectual force. Yet, out of the whole cluster of preacher-authors, one can strictly claim for literature only our American Kingsley—Edward Everett Hale. It is not so much by warrant of his studies in Spanish history that we class him among the literati—although in some degree he has proved the successor of Prescott in this field, and has lately prepared “The Story of Spain” for Putnam’s Nations Series; but it is in virtue of his novels, his help-stories for young folks, and his books of travel.

Mr. Hale’s home is in Roxbury (the “Highland” region), five-minutes’ ride, by steam car, from the heart of Boston. “Rocksbury,” as it was spelled in the old documents, is a rocky and craggy place, as its name indicates. If you are curious to know where the rocks came from, just turn to Dr. Holmes’s “Dorchester Giant,” and read about that plum-pudding, as big as the State House dome, which was demolished by the giant’s wife and screaming boys:

“They flung it over to Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;
They tumbled as thick as rain.”