Kellogg the Author
Wilmot Brookings Mitchell
“If the gods would give me the desire of my heart,” exclaims Thackeray in The Roundabout Papers, “I should write a story which boys would relish for the next few dozen of centuries.” This is a glorious immortality which Thackeray desires for his boys’ story. Generously have the gods dealt with that author whose writings for boys have been relished even a quarter of a century.
Of the stories and declamations of Elijah Kellogg the past at least is secure. What boy reader did not relish “Good Old Times” and “Lion Ben”? What schoolboy has not“met upon the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Rome could furnish, and yet never has lowered his arm”? The schoolboy of the future will be of different stuff from the schoolboy of the past if, when declaiming to his mates on a Friday afternoon, he does not begin in subdued tones and stand, like Regulus, “calm, cold, and immovable as the marble walls around him,” and end in guttural tones and in a fine frenzy with “the curse of Jove is on thee—a clinging, wasting curse.” “Spartacus to the Gladiators,” the first of Mr. Kellogg’s eleven declamations, was written, as has already been said,[4] in 1842, for one of the rhetorical exercises at Andover Seminary. At this exercise there was present a Phillips Academy boy, John Marshall Marsters. Some years afterward, when Marsters was to take part in the Boylston Prize Speaking at Harvard College, he secured from Mr. Kellogg a copy of “Spartacus.” In this, as in many similar competitions, it proved a prize-winner; and it so won the admiration of Mr. Epes Sargent, one of the judges, that he first published it, in 1846, in his “School Reader.” Since then no school or college speaker has been deemed complete unless it included“Spartacus to the Gladiators.”
“Regulus to the Carthaginians” Mr. Kellogg wrote at Harpswell for his friend, Stephen Abbott Holt, then a student at Bowdoin College, who first declaimed it in the Junior Prize Speaking, August 25, 1845; and it was first published in 1857 in Town and Holbrook’s Reader. Most of his other declamations were written for Our Young Folks, and similar magazines.
As school and college declamations, these have seldom, if ever, been surpassed. Vivid in description, stirring in sentiment, alive with action, dramatically portraying concrete deeds of heroism, they are especially attractive to school and college boys. Nearly all of these, it will be noticed, deal with ancient characters and events. From the time Mr. Kellogg began to prepare for college in his father’s study, he was exceedingly fond of the ancient classics. He had in his library at the time of his death 235 volumes of the classics of Greece and Rome. Well versed in Greek and Roman history and mythology, he could fittingly extol the patriotism of Leonidas and Decius; bewail the woes of the Roman debtor; incite the gladiators to revolt; and appeal to the Roman legions, or curse the Carthaginians through the mouth of Icilius or Regulus.
With the exception of a few bits of verse written while he was an undergraduate and printed in the college paper, The Bowdoin Portfolio, “Spartacus” was the first of Mr. Kellogg’s writings to be published. During the twenty-three years between 1843, when he became pastor of the church at Harpswell, Maine, and 1866, when he resigned as pastor of the Mariners’ Church in Boston, he wrote very little that was printed: “Regulus,” an ode for the celebration of Bowdoin’s semi-centennial in 1852, and a sermon, “The Strength and Beauty of the Sanctuary,” preached at the dedication of the Congregation Chapel, St. Lawrence Street, Portland, Maine, in 1858. After 1866, after Mr. Kellogg was more than fifty years old, came that rather remarkable period of story-writing. Uncommon is it for a story-writer not to begin his career until after he has lived two score years and ten. That Mr. Kellogg could tell a tale, however, in a way to interest boys, his college mates discovered during his undergraduate days; for those well acquainted with him in college, as they have recorded their recollections of young Kellogg, seldom fail to mention that “he was very fluent in talk, exceedingly interesting as a conversationalist, and an excellent story-teller.”