On the lightning’s wing my pathway urge,
On thrones of foam right joyous ride,
’Mid the sullen dash of the angry tide.”
It is not altogether fancy that recognizes in such lines as these hints of the impetuous and stirring rhetoric of Mr. Kellogg’s later prose, especially on occasions when his deepest feelings were moved, and he spoke of love and duty, of character and destiny, of life and immortality, out of the fulness of his conviction, and with the ardor and eloquence of his sensitive and poetic nature.
So passed his college days, in the keen enjoyment of generous comradeship, in the instinctive indulgence of his fondness for fun and frolic, in the cheerful acceptance of the burden of defraying his own expenses, in manly fidelity to the appointed studies of the course, and in the voluntary and congenial exercise of the literary gifts with which he was endowed, and through which he has made so many of us his debtors. And through it all he preserved the unaffected simplicity and purity of heart, the reverence for truth, and the consideration and charity for his fellows, which were the winning characteristics of his whole life.
Mr. Kellogg’s theological training in immediate preparation for the ministry was received at Andover Theological Seminary from 1840 to 1843. The intellectual and social conditions which prevail at the professional school are quite unlike those of the college. It does not have the same atmosphere of venerated tradition and compelling custom, nor is it the scene of a life so varied and buoyant. The students are older, more sedate, and more intent upon the special studies of the place. They have passed through the period of boyish effervescence and frolic, of ardent and generous comradeship, of steadfast friendships and changing schemes of life, of relative unconcern for what lies beyond the horizon of the college world—and the period is not to be repeated. They are committed to common pursuits and ambitions, and are sobered by the duties and responsibilities of life to which they are sensibly drawing near.
In his college life Mr. Kellogg found the material for a series of sparkling stories, evidently as congenial to himself as they have been interesting to his readers; but of life in the seminary he has given us no picture. This is not to the discredit of the honored school of theology to which he went, nor does it imply that he did not enter into its studies and its life with heartiness and joy, but it is a natural result of the distinction which has been suggested between the college and the professional school. The picturesque nook or landscape attracts the pencil or the brush of the artist, but his choice does not discredit the thousand scenes of field and pasture and hill and woodland which he passes by as unsuited to his artistic purpose.
It is enough to mention the names of Moses Stuart, Bela Edwards, Leonard Woods, Ralph Emerson, and Edwards Park, to show that Mr. Kellogg was as fortunate in his teachers at the seminary as he had been at the college. They were men of profound learning, of stimulating influence, of consecrated character, and of great and deserved reputation. They could not fail to quicken and enrich both his intellectual and his spiritual nature, and to send him forth fully instructed, as well as profoundly eager, to preach with persuasiveness and power, as he did preach for nearly half a century.