The great tenderness of his nature was particularly prominent in his family relations. He trained his children in the paths of knowledge, his well-disciplined mind making him a safe and wise teacher; while, like him, they were pious from their youth. His only son graduated with honor from his own college, and had just started on a literary career with flattering success, when consumption caused his death, in his twenty-fourth year. Two daughters, also, at the early ages of twenty and twenty-two, were taken from the household, and in their old age one daughter only was left to these parents. Mr. Prince’s contemporaries speak of his wonderful resignation at these repeated afflictions. His sermon on the death of his daughter Deborah gives the religious experience of a young girl who, in those rigorous Calvinistic days, had her sweet young life overshadowed by the terror of God’s wrath for what she considered her unbelief. A few extracts will give a good idea of Mr. Prince’s impassioned, pathetic, and even dramatic style, and his apparently “trifling details” add vividness to the picture. His son besought him to dispense with the custom of a funeral oration in his case; but the feelings of the father were sacrificed to what he considered his duty to the youth of his congregation on the occasion of his daughter’s death.

He said: “You have known her character; I need not give it to this assembly, and I am more especially restrained, not only by my near relation, but by what she said to me, with all the emotions of a grieved heart, three or four days before her death. ‘Dear father, I have been told you speak to people in my commendation. I beg you would not. I am a poor, miserable sinner; you cannot think how it grieves me.’ On these accounts I must forbear her character; but because God’s dealings with her, both before and in her sickness, have been remarkable, I cannot but think it will be for his glory and your advantage to present some of them to you. As she grew up, God was pleased to refrain her from vanities, move her to study her Bible and best of authors, both of history and divinity. Dr. Watts and Mrs. Rowe’s writings were familiar to her. The spirit of God worked upon her at fourteen, but she did not join the church until two years later, when she narrowly escaped drowning, in her father’s bosom. For, as I had just received her in my arms, in a boat, in order to go on board a vessel in the harbor, bound to her Uncle Denny’s, at Georgetown, on the Kennebec river, the boat steered off, and I fell back with her into the salt water, ten feet deep, with which she was almost filled, and we both continued under it, out of sight of her brother and sister looking on, for about a minute. If a couple of strangers from Connecticut had not been near at hand to reach her quickly, in a minute or more she had been past recovery....

“In all weathers she sought the house of God, and she was afraid of being deceived. Though her jealousies and fears were troublesome, I think they were useful. Sometimes she had light and comfort; oftener otherwise. In her twentieth year she had a fever, and from the first she thought she should not live, complained of her stupidity of mind, impenitence and unbelief. I came home from afternoon exercise, found her so ill that her mother thought herself obliged to tell her, upon which she thanked her for her kindness, but quickly fell into great distress on being unprepared for eternity. It would break a heart of stone to hear her: ‘Oh! dear sir, what shall I do?’ ... Oh! the horrors of that night. It was one of the most distressing I ever knew. She wouldn’t close her eyes for fear of dying. In the morning was a little more resigned, fell asleep, awoke refreshed, but still in darkness. ‘Oh! dear father,’ she would say, ‘I have dreadfully apostatized from Christ.’ Mr. Sewall and I labored with her for days, but we found nobody but the Almighty could do it.

“Dr. Sewall said, ‘If she died in darkness, we should have good ground to hope that she would awake in glory.’ To everything he would say she would reply, ‘I cannot believe.’ You must be sensible of a distressed father’s heart, putting his soul in her soul’s place for many weeks.

“Incessant prayers were offered for her in public and private, by relations and friends who loved her, but until the last half hour of her life were unanswered. She was in agonies of death all the while Mr. Sewall was praying. When he and the physician left, I told her they could do nothing more. She was calm and composed, but did not speak.... It was so dismal to see her depart in darkness. Oh! the distress in that room. I held her in my arms, she opened her eyes and spoke a new language: ‘Oh! I love the Lord with all my heart. I see such an amiableness in him, I prize him above a thousand worlds.’ I said, ‘Dear child, what have you to say to me?’—‘Oh! sir, that you may be more fervent in your ministry, in exhorting and expostulating with sinners.’ I never saw such a change in a sick room, from distress to joy when I reported her words. I could scarcely have thought a father, mother, brother and sister could have been so transported in the expiring moments of one so dear to them.”

This discourse was published in Edinboro’ after his death. His daughter Sarah, afterwards wife of Lieut.-Gov. Gill, survived her parents a few years, but died, without children in 1771. She was also deeply religious, and some of her writings were published in Edinboro’ after her death.

Mr. Prince’s life, aside from his domestic afflictions, seems to have flowed on in peaceful paths, that ran their quiet course between the hardships of the early years of the colonies and the rising passions and frequent strifes that reigned, particularly in New England, for years before the Revolutionary war. His whole nature, tuned to harmony and peaceful avocations, developed in its proper channel. The comparative quiet of the first half of the eighteenth century permitted a thorough devotion to his allotted pursuits. His forty years’ pastorate in Boston left their trace of love and good-will in seed which can never be destroyed, and his indefatigable industry and painstaking perseverance are lessons that could be of benefit to all generations.

He inherited a large property from his father. Beside other lands, acquired and inherited, he owned the tract which is covered by the town of Princeton, including Wachusett mountain, the town deriving its name from him. In the Boylston Mansion at Princeton, there is a beautiful crayon portrait of Mrs. Sarah Gill, his daughter, executed by Copley. There is also a fine tall clock, which belonged to Mr. Prince, in the possession of Mrs. Addison Denny, at Leicester. Mr. Prince brought it with him from England in 1717; the whole case is in raised Japanese work, and the face decorations very elaborate. It was made by Thomas Wagstaffe, of London, and his descendants still make clocks at the same shop, by hand and under the same name.

Mr. Prince died in 1757, after a year’s illness, at seventy-two years of age. The Weekly Gazette said, in announcing his death: “His performances in pulpit evidence a vast compass of thought, a sublime imagination, a great faith and zeal. In printed composures there is a fertility of invention, correctness of sentiment, sprightliness of expression, that must delight every reader, and transmit his name to posterity in the most advantageous light. His private life was amiable and exemplary, adorned with grace and virtues. A useful member of civil society. His consort has lost an affectionate husband; his only surviving daughter, a tender father; his servants, an indulgent master; his acquaintances, a kind, condescending friend; his church, an enlightened and vigilant pastor; his country, a zealous advocate of civil and religious liberty. Took farewell to this world with humble resignation to the will of God, and entire dependence on our Lord Jesus Christ, and a good hope of Immortality.”