ELIJAH KELLOGG
THE MAN AND HIS WORK

Elijah Kellogg at Sixty-five.
1878.

ELIJAH KELLOGG
THE MAN AND HIS WORK

CHAPTERS FROM HIS LIFE AND SELECTIONS
FROM HIS WRITINGS

EDITED BY
WILMOT BROOKINGS MITCHELL
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ORATORY
BOWDOIN COLLEGE

BOSTON
LEE AND SHEPARD
1903

Copyright, 1903, by Lee and Shepard.
Published, November, 1903.
All Rights Reserved.
Elijah Kellogg.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To
FRANK GILMAN KELLOGG
AND
MARY CATHERINE BATCHELDER
THIS SCANTY RECORD
OF THE
LIFE AND WORK OF THEIR BELOVED FATHER
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

This book makes no pretence of expounding the doctrines of the theologian or analyzing the methods of the artist. It is simply a remembrancer of a quaint and winning man for his intimate friends and parishioners; for the boys who have delighted in his stories; for the sailors whose lives he saved from shipwreck; for the college students who learned from him a wisdom not to be found in books; for all, in fact, to whom the memory of his unique personality is dear. With the story of his life, with anecdote and reminiscence, with selections from his speeches, sermons, letters, and journal, it aims to recall Elijah Kellogg as he really was: the boy, tingling with life and full of fun to his finger tips; the college student, genial, prankish, and zealous; the farmer-preacher, devout and resourceful, making pen and book, scythe and hoe, seine and boat, all his ready servants to do God’s work; the author, finding his way straight to the heart of the growing boy; the aged man, fond as ever of the soil and the sea, and after all the rubs and chances of a long life, still young in spirit, strong in faith, and free from bitterness and guile.

Acknowledgment is here due to Mr. Kellogg’s son and daughter, Mr. Frank G. Kellogg and Mrs. Mary C. Batchelder, and to many of his intimate acquaintances in Harpswell and Brunswick for information relating to his early Harpswell life. Special acknowledgment is also due to President William DeWitt Hyde for valuable advice concerning the preparation of this book.

W. B. M.

Brunswick, Maine,
November 23, 1903.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ELIJAH KELLOGG: THE BOY

George Lewis

It is much easier to read the boy after you see and know the man than it is to read the man when you see and know only the boy. Manhood may be the unfolding of the various forces and dispositions of boyhood, but this unfolding must take place before the boyhood itself can be comprehended. The mill must grind the wheat into flour and the flour be baked and eaten before we can know how good the kernels of wheat are. So we must see Elijah Kellogg as a man before we can fairly estimate him as a lad. When we hear him preach or when we read some of his books, then we know there was something in him when a child more than mere roguery and fun. Genius was there. Powers and faculties were there which, when trained by judgment and directed by piety, made him the preacher to whom men and women loved to listen, and the writer of books that captivated the hearts of all boys.

This man first saw the light May 20, 1813, in a house on Congress Street in Portland, Maine, where dwelt the pastor of the Second Congregational Church of the city. The baby was called Elijah because that was the father’s name; and the father at his birth had been called Elijah because of the famous prophet in Israel who bore the name. At the father’s birth it was said by his parents, “We must have a prophet in the family.” So the name Elijah was given to the boy and he proved a prophet not in name only, but in reality as well. The Rev. Elijah Kellogg, pastor of the Second Congregational parish in Portland during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, was no mean representative of the old Hebrew prophet. The famous name sat well and appropriately upon the younger man. Had the Rev. Mr. Kellogg lived in the days of Ahab, of infamous memory, we may be very sure he would have stood beside the old prophet in his stout resistance to that wicked king; and had the Hebrew prophet been born in New England in the eighteenth century he would have sympathized warmly with his young namesake as he buckled on his belt and beat the drum for the patriots at the battle of Bunker Hill, and put forth all his skill and strength to free the colonies from the selfish and tyrannical rule of George III. There never yet was a true prophet of God in any land whose heart did not beat warmly for larger popular liberty and for a higher type of righteousness. Every prophet looks toward a sunrising that shall bring to earth a better day.

Elijah Kellogg, Sr., was but a boy at the opening of our Revolutionary struggle, but he was a boy of high spirit, of dauntless courage, and of most generous impulses. He derived these qualities of character from two distinct sources. These sources were, first, his ancestry, and second, the neighborhood where he was born, viz., South Hadley, Massachusetts. A boy could hardly be born and reared in the atmosphere of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, especially around Northampton and the Hadleys at that period of time, and be anything other than a freedom-loving patriot. It was a region of country favorable to the growth of heroes. Settled by stanch and sturdy Puritans, its people had for many years been sternly disciplined by the Indian troubles. No pusillanimous and faint-hearted men could by any means live long in that section. Only men of courage and strength could abide there. The Kelloggs proved what stuff they were made of, for the family had been living there for more than a century when Elijah came upon the scene. They were there when the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, pursued by the rancorous hatred of Charles II., sought an asylum in New England. Those men came first to New Haven for shelter, but even there they were not safe from the emissaries of the king. The protection, however, that New Haven could not afford them, Hadley could. Among the steel-hearted men of that up-river country they found safety. In that region was an association of liberty-loving souls, which, better than woods and better than caves, made life safe for those men who had helped behead a faithless king and had thereby given the cause of political and religious freedom a great uplift. Some towns are vastly better for boys to be born in than other towns are. South Hadley was one of the “better towns,” where Elijah Kellogg, Sr., saw the light for the first time in the year 1761.

Furthermore, there was good blood in the Kellogg veins irrespective of their geography. They were a worthy race anywhere and in all circumstances. Among the ancestors of this prophet-named lad were men who had borne the banner of the cross in Palestine with Richard of the Lion Heart, and others who had been true and stanch men in the Wars of the Roses and during the great reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth, and still others there were who a little later for their conscience’ sake had come to America. With such an ancestry as that and with a birthplace like South Hadley, it is no wonder that we find young Kellogg at Bunker Hill, where were fired the opening guns of the Revolution; or that a little later he endured the privations of Valley Forge and fought at Monmouth. He was, however, formed for scholarship rather than for military life, and after the war he entered and graduated at Dartmouth College. In 1788 the Second Church of Portland gave him a call to their pastorate. He accepted the call, and after this time Portland was his home as long as he lived.

Elijah Kellogg, Jr., had a good deal come to him from his father’s side of the house. He also had a good deal come to him from his mother’s side. This mother of his had once been Eunice McLellan. Her father was Captain Joseph McLellan and her mother was Mary, daughter of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, who had been among the earliest settlers of Gorham, Maine. Eunice, therefore (Mrs. Kellogg), was a McLellan of the McLellans. The family were Scotch-Irish people, and were descended from old Sir Hugh, who was knighted in the year 1515, and the race was one of strong family characteristics. Even at the present time they are somewhat clannish, and to this day throughout New England the name McLellan is regarded by him who bears it as a sort of patent of nobility; and all agree that there are few if any names in the country more worthy of respect and honor than that one.

Joseph McLellan was a born sailor if ever there was one, an adventurous rover of the seas, always happiest when on blue water with a good ship under his feet and a stiff breeze blowing him along his course. This man sent his own disposition down the family stream, and gave to his grandson Elijah a generous share of that same roving and adventurous spirit. The story is told that on the birth of an infant daughter to Joseph and Mary the parents decided to call her Esther, or as it was pronounced in those days, Easter. The babe was taken to the church that she might be baptized at the hands of the Rev. Mr. Deane. At the font the name of the child was handed to the clergyman, Easter, upon which he broke out, “Easter! Easter! That is no good name for a girl. Call her after my wife. Call her Eunice. Eunice, I baptize thee,” etc. The deed was done, and the child was Eunice in spite of both father and mother. The baby thus curiously named became in due time the wife of Parson Kellogg and the mother of the subject of this sketch. The McLellans were a canny folk. They had fought for Scottish liberty in many a sharp tug with the Saxons in the old days. They had helped fight the battles of the Covenanters at a later period, and now in the eighteenth century, transferred to America, they still kept up the fight and played their part on many a field, from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

Blood will tell. Family traits will be transmitted. Sons will in some degree resemble sires. With an ancestry on both sides like that sketched above, it is no great wonder that the subject of this volume became the man he did. He had a good start. There was in him a goodly fund of inherited gifts. In the book,“Good Old Times,” which is Mr. Kellogg’s story of the McLellan family (his grandmother’s branch of it more particularly), the author lets us see how largely his own personal character was formed and his whole life influenced by the traditions and stories of the men and women of the family, recounted as those stories were at the fireside in the winter evenings, and told over again in the daytime as men and boys were doing their work in the woods and in the fields. The boy was perfectly happy when listening to these tales of pioneer life, made up as they largely were of homely and commonplace incidents and yet of really adventurous deeds. They were tales of conflict with the Indians, in which the McLellan fairness and good sense always won the respect of the savages and in most cases secured their good will and good treatment; of encounters with bears and wolves and other wild beasts, where man’s craft and skill gained the victory; and experiences with cold and hunger and hardships of the wilderness, in which Christian faith and the McLellan pluck overcame all odds and achieved a good measure of prosperity. Things like these were the folk-lore of the Gorham people rather than stories of round tables and fairies and ghosts and witches. This boy, like Carlyle, came to have a great admiration for the “man who could do things.” The ideal hero of Elijah Kellogg’s early boyhood was the hearty, warm-hearted, rough-handed, whole-souled pioneer who never turned his back upon a foe, whether biped or quadruped, and who never blenched in the face of a difficulty or a danger. He was the man who had in himself resources that were always called out and brought into exercise when obstacles were encountered, and invariably rose superior to the obstacles and made the man complete master of the situation, however bad that situation appeared. As he would have phrased it, he liked the man who never got whipped. The white man who could outwit an Indian or outhug a bear or outrun a pack of wolves was a man to be admired. The man who could fell a forest and clear a farm and put the soil to the production of corn and wheat was a man to be admired. This hero of Kellogg’s childhood was never entirely dethroned from the heart of the man. To the end of his days he loved that man who, using his own native strength, could bridle and ride the storm, or over the rudest billows of the ocean could bring his vessel into port.

Rev. Elijah Kellogg. 1796.
Father of Elijah Kellogg.
From a miniature.

It is almost superfluous to say that the man who wrote such books for boys as are the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove series of stories was himself, when a lad, what would be called to-day an irrepressible. Without the least spice of malice or any suggestion of real harm in his nature, Elijah Kellogg was as full of mischief as a spring is of water, and it was simply impossible for parents and guardians to keep him within the bounds of Puritan propriety. It weighed not one jot with him that grave ministers and dignified elders of the church were among his forbears. It never occurred to him that because his father was a clergyman therefore he, the boy, should not go with other boys on Sunday morning to enjoy a frolic and take a swim in the waters of Back Cove, well out of sight from the parsonage windows, though of course such things on the Lord’s Day were strictly forbidden. Elijah’s proclivities were well known, and many were the family traps that were set for his ensnarement. But he had great facility for getting out of scrapes as well as getting into them. He did not, however, always escape detection. On one occasion, for example, the Sunday morning swim and games had been too fascinating for his boyish discretion, and had held him at the water until the public services for the morning at the church had closed. Elijah went home to meet his father, who had missed the boy from his proper seat in the family pew. That meeting between father and son can be more easily imagined than described, especially if the reader happens to be the child of a stern Puritan church-goer, and has himself been guilty of escapades on Sunday. To the question, “Where have you been this morning?” the boy replied without hesitation that he had been to the Methodist meeting. He heard his father preach every Sunday, and he had become a little tired of hearing one voice, and he wanted to hear what some other man had to say. Of course the next question was, “What was the preacher’s text?” Elijah was ready for this and at once gave chapter and verse and repeated the passage. But the inquisition did not stop here; he must now give some account of the sermon. This seemed a perfectly easy matter to the young culprit. He had heard a good many sermons, and he felt very sure that he could report one even though he had not listened to it at all. But here he was caught. He had never heard anything but the rigid, old-school, Calvinistic doctrines, and it never entered his head that one minister did not always preach like another. It was therefore a sound Calvinistic sermon that this young reporter put into the mouth of the Methodist minister. He was soon brought up short with the paternal remark: “Elijah, stop right there. Now I know you are lying. No Methodist minister ever preached like that. Your whole story is false. You have spent your morning down by the water.”

When Elijah was some ten or eleven years old he was taken to Gorham, and spent some months in the home of Mrs. Lothrop Lewis. Mrs. Lewis had a young daughter whom she wished put into a Portland school, and an exchange of children was made with the Kelloggs, they taking the girl into their home and Mrs. Lewis taking the boy into hers. This exchange was in many respects a grateful one to the boy. The country was the place for him. There was more freedom there, more room and more chance for fun than in town. Perhaps, too, the fact that his father was nine miles away had its alleviations, for the presence of a father, however dearly he was loved, was a damper on the spirit of prankishness. While with Mrs. Lewis, Elijah certainly made mischief for everybody, but at the same time he made friends of everybody, for none could help loving the bright and lively fellow. In due time the boy went back to Portland. But the city was no place for a lad like him. He chafed under its restraints, and cared but little for its schools. He was like a sea-gull shut up in a cage. As the imprisoned gull pines for the freedom of wind and wave so did the heart of Elijah Kellogg long for the free winds and the rolling waters and the ships that went sailing away to distant ports. It was a longing that could not be suppressed, and no one can really blame him that before he was thirteen years old he had found his way on board a ship and become a sailor in downright earnest. I am sure that the boys who read his books are not sorry that the hand that wrote those stories gained some of its cunning by pulling ropes, furling and unfurling sails, taking his trick at the wheel, and sharing actively in whatever pertained to the handling and management of vessels. He loved the sea, and was fascinated by the strange sights and sounds of foreign countries. He was a keen observer for a boy just entering his teens, and he gained much valuable knowledge as he wandered round the world borne along by the wings of a ship. But in his roving he never for one moment forgot his home. His heart was warm and true to the friends who were there. Letters written to his father from different quarters of the world are now in existence, and they bear full testimony to his ardent affection for home and friends. His love for friends was perhaps the strongest element of his nature, even stronger than his love of adventure, and in due time that love brought him back from his travels no longer to sail the seas except in small boats near the shore. In the story of “Charlie Bell,” Mr. Kellogg (unconsciously, no doubt) has given us the picture of a boy’s nature and disposition very much like his own.

After returning from sea Elijah found Portland and Portland ways no more congenial to him than they had been before he went away, and again he left home and went to Gorham to try life among his McLellan relatives. He lived for a time in the family of Major Warren on a farm some two miles out of the village, matching his own strength of muscle with that of the regular farm-hands. He was not there a great while, however. Rev. Mr. Kellogg came out from Portland and interviewed Mr. Alexander McLellan, a near relative of his own wife, and the result of that interview was that Elijah was, after the fashion of the time, indentured as an apprentice to Mr. McLellan to do general work on the place for the period of one year. The purpose of this indenture, however, was rather to restrain and hold him in one stated place than to make a servant of him, for he became at once a true member of the family “in good and regular standing.” He took his position and did his share of the work on the place in a faithful and orderly manner. His experience on the ship had been of great benefit to him. He had there learned the lessons of obedience and of industry,—lessons absolutely essential for every boy to learn if he would ever arrive at a worthy maturity. Now, instead of blocks and ropes and belaying pins, his tools were the plough, the hoe, the scythe, and the axe, and while using these he could almost fancy himself a pioneer. All this was a very wholesome kind of life and a right life in its way. Still it was no proper life for such a young man as by this time Elijah Kellogg had become. All his friends seemed to feel the incongruity of it, and the truth of this began to dawn upon himself, also. He began to feel, and to feel very strongly, that this sort of life was not up to his own level. The bird is for a life higher than the ground, and in like manner he was for something higher than the farm. There was a real genius in the soul of this boy that was reaching up toward intellectual exercises. Decks of ships, fields of corn, loads of lumber, were all good, but for him there was something better. The play of intellect appealed to him now more than the play of muscle did. All the associations in the family where he lived and those throughout the village were such as to encourage and foster this new ambition. This new feeling, this new ideal which was fast taking possession of his mind, was only an indication that the doors of boyhood were closing and the doors of manhood were beginning to open. He was gradually coming to understand himself and to have a dawning perception of some God-given powers, which, if they were properly trained, might result in the accomplishment of fine things. This vision of what he might sometime perform, if he would, rose to the front, and for the time assumed the leadership of his life. He was as obedient to this vision as Saint Paul was obedient to the vision he had near the city of Damascus, or as Abraham Lincoln was obedient to those dreams and visions that he had while he was managing the flatboat on the great river. The McLellan family, where he was living, were heartily in sympathy with this new development. From oldest to youngest they all felt that it was not a proper thing that this young man who was so gifted and who showed so many marks of a true genius should spend his energies on the farm and in the shop. There is iron for the place of iron and steel for the place of steel and silver for that of silver. This was a piece of silver, and he ought to take his proper place. It is needless to say how much this change of aim on the part of Elijah gladdened the heart of his own father. It was indeed a day of general thanksgiving when this young man put himself in the way of a higher intellectual development and entered Gorham Academy as one of its students. This was one of the best academies in the country at that day. Its presiding genius was Master Nason who was known far and wide, not only as one who could keep rude boys in subjection to school rules by a liberal use of the birch, but as one who possessed faculty and power to stir the minds of pupils and impart to them rich stores of knowledge. New England has seen few instructors equal to Master Nason. The names of boys whom, in the old Academy at Gorham, he fitted for college, have in several instances become known all over the country, and some are known round the world. The Academy is proud of its roll of graduates, and those who studied under Mr. Nason have always been proud of their teacher.

Young Kellogg now put himself squarely down to hard work. He was older than are most boys when they take up the higher branches of study and begin to point their way definitely toward college, and he studied and worked in the Academy like one who is trying to make up for lost time. Such an intensity of application to books as was his at this time would have broken down many students; but Kellogg had a rare stock of good health and physical strength. He could well stand the strain of hard study. He had a well-knit frame. He never forgot how much of his own power of endurance he derived from his sturdy habits of toil in field and forest. He never forgot what a good physical basis for intellectual work manual labor gives one. In one of the college boys of his creation in the Whispering Pine series of books—Henry Morton—he shows the close connection between that young man’s hoe and axe and his leadership of the college class. When Mr. Kellogg did this, he knew very well what he was talking about. Seventy years ago these things largely took the place of the athletic field of our time, and they filled that place very well, too. An old fogy may perhaps be pardoned for saying that in spite of all the excitement and glory of base-ball and foot-ball and running and leaping and boating, still the oil of hoe handle has its virtues as a medicine for students.

The life of young Kellogg shows distinctly two points of turning. The first one was when he wakened to the consciousness of his mental powers; when he realized something of what he was and determined that he would live on the high level of his intellectual self. A young horse that has in him the elements of speed to win a race on the track is trained for the track. The horse of great weight is put into the truck team. Animals are put in training, according to what they are. When Kellogg realized something of his own intellectual power, then he put himself in training for an intellectual life. He therefore went into the Academy that he might fit for college. After he had begun work in the Academy there came to him another consideration, and he asked the question: “Is a life of mere scholarship the highest and best one of which I am capable?” He felt surely that he ought to live up to the level of his mind, but he began to feel that there was some power in himself superior to that of brains and that that higher power should be developed and his own life should be devoted to that which was supreme. He felt strongly that he should not allow the spiritual element of his nature to lie dormant or go to waste. The diamond that is not ground on the wheel is just as hard as the one that is ground, but it does not sparkle and flash like the one on which the lapidary has spent his skill. The uncut diamond is like the man who stops in the classical school and does not care for the infinitely finer work that religion does for him. Mr. Kellogg felt that it was not enough for him to have power. The power that was in him should be dedicated to the divinest ends. It should be religiously dedicated and consecrated. This was the second turning of his life, and when it was made he had become an earnest and devoted Christian. He understood Christianity to mean that he should employ the faculties and powers of his own nature in helping other people to lead better and more wholesome lives. Christianity meant more than self-culture; it meant self-giving. If there was in himself (as there certainly was) a large element of fun, this was by no means to be suppressed or sent into eclipse. Religion would not maim him that way any more than religion would clip the wings of a robin and make a mole of the bird. But religion would take that spirit of fun and cause it to play and shine and work for the production of purer thinking and cleaner living and higher aiming among all young people.

It was in obedience to this new spirit that Elijah went to work at once outside of the Academy as well as in it, and he then started some streams of religious influence that have by no means ceased running even to this day. Among the things he did at this period was to go into a certain neighborhood not many miles from Gorham and start a Sunday-school. It seems easy enough to say that the young man went into a certain place and organized a Sunday-school, but from all accounts it was by no means an easy or even a safe thing for that young man to do. Three score and odd years ago—long before the days of Neal Dow and the Maine Law—there were certain regions here and there in the State where those people who were ignorant and given to drink and other forms of vice were sure to congregate like birds of ill omen, and there would be a neighborhood from which respectable people would keep away. Such a community was a multiplied Ishmael whose hand was against every man and every man’s hand against it. On one of these disreputable districts Elijah’s attention became fixed. With two or three of the people who lived there he had in some way become acquainted, and he “felt a call” to preach in that place. But even Elijah Kellogg, young, brave, and stout-hearted as he was, shrank from going there alone with an invitation to a Sunday-school to be sent abroad among that class of folk. He feared what might come from such a movement, and wished for a companion to share his fortunes. He appealed to a young friend, George L. Prentiss, afterward for many years an honored professor in Union Theological Seminary in New York, to go with him. But the response of Prentiss to this request was not favorable. “No, Elijah,” was his word,“I don’t dare to go down there. They will kill us if we do.” Then after a moment’s pause, “I’ll tell you what I will do. If you go down there and start a Sunday-school and don’t get killed, I’ll come in later and help you.” But Elijah had set his heart on doing the bit of work, and was not to be scared out of it. He started on his mission alone, and I doubt if Judson on his way to India, or Livingstone going to Africa, did a more heroic thing than that. He did start a Sunday-school, and he did get the people interested in both himself and his school, and through his influence the community was transformed, and to-day the descendants of those people are an intelligent, God-fearing, church-going, high-minded class of citizens, and they are such because of Mr. Kellogg. He never forgot them, and they never forgot him. The writer of this article was present in company with Mr. Kellogg at the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of that school. The season was mid-summer. The day was Sunday. The place was the church. The audience was everybody who lived in the district, supplemented by a large number who had driven thither from Portland, Westbrook, Gorham, Scarboro, and Saco. The larger share of those who had gathered were not able to get inside the church, but they crowded as close to the wide open windows as possible and heard what they could. After brief introductory exercises, Mr. Kellogg preached a most beautiful and touching sermon of some twenty minutes’ length. Then the Bible was closed, and a period of story-telling began. There were present some four or five persons who remembered the “first day of school” fifty years before. They all talked. Reminiscences were called up, old scenes revived, old stories told, old experiences related, and the old time was contrasted with the new. It was all of it immensely funny. Sometimes it was crying, but a good deal more it was laughing. My own feeling at the moment was that it was fortunate the windows were open, for otherwise the house must have burst. I do not think there ever was another church than that since churches were built where was heard so much laughter and manifested so much fun and wit on Sunday.

Mr. Kellogg got through with the Academy, and entered Bowdoin College in 1836. It is worthy of note that in all his long life he never shuffled off the boy. It was not a mere memory on his part that he once was a boy. The genuine boy was never a memory with him, but was always a present reality. In one sense he was as young at eighty as he was at eighteen. Boys were his mates always. There are men who, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, never grow old, and Mr. Kellogg was one of them. To the very last his lips would smile and his eyes would twinkle as he recalled some prank of his boyhood or told tales of those who had been his companions on the ship and on the farm and in the school. He never forgot a friend, and he certainly never forgot a funny or laughable incident. His own perennial boyhood has cheered and made more noble an almost numberless band of young lives throughout the country, and may the time be long before the young people of the land shall cease to read his wholesome books.

COLLEGE AND SEMINARY

Henry Leland Chapman

It was in 1836, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, that Elijah Kellogg entered Bowdoin College as a Freshman. His father had been one of the earliest and firmest friends of the college. As one of the Cumberland County Association of Ministers he had joined in the petition to the General Court of Massachusetts for the establishment of a collegiate institution in the province of Maine. When in answer to the petition of the ministers, and of the Court of Sessions of Cumberland County, the college was incorporated in 1794, Mr. Kellogg was named as one of the first board of overseers. Four years later he became a trustee, and continued to hold that official relation to the college until 1824. During his boyhood, therefore, and before he cherished any purpose or desire to enjoy its privileges, Elijah must have heard, within the family circle, much about the college which was so great an object of interest and pride to his father, as it was, indeed, to the whole community. It was but natural, therefore, when his purpose was seriously formed to seek a college training in preparation for his father’s calling of the ministry, that Bowdoin, aside from its proximity to his home, should be the college of his choice. But his course collegeward was interrupted and delayed by various circumstances, and particularly by personal tastes that were quite other than scholastic. Always a lover of the sea, and delighting in the tales of sea life and adventure to which he listened from the lips of sailors themselves along the Portland wharves, it is not strange that the call of the sea sounded louder than any other in his ears. So, listening to the call, he shipped before the mast, and for three years lived the hard and perilous life of a sailor. It is true that the experience, which may have been useful to him in other ways also, was an admirable preparation for the brilliant service which he afterwards performed as chaplain of the Sailor’s Home in Boston, but in the meantime it made him late in entering upon his college life. It is to be said, however, that of his thirty classmates six were as old as himself.

Mrs. Eunice McClellan Kellogg.
Mother of Elijah Kellogg.

We must look to certain volumes of the Whispering Pines series, and particularly to the volumes entitled “The Spark of Genius,” “The Sophomores of Radcliffe,” and “The Whispering Pine,” for a picture of his college life, true in its general features, and graphic like everything from Mr. Kellogg’s pen. These books, which have been read with eager interest by so many generations of boys, describe Bowdoin College, its professors, students, customs, and manners as they were known to Elijah Kellogg during the years of his residence there from 1836 to 1840. If they seem to be devoted largely to a recital of pranks and mischief and practical jokes among the students, it is partly because such things made a stronger appeal to scheming brains, and youthful fellowship, and leisure hours in those days, before athletic sports enlisted, as they have since enlisted, the restless energy and high spirits and intense rivalry of college boys; and partly, also, it was because his native sense of humor and love of fun, his spirit of adventure and personal courage, constituted an ever present temptation to him to share or lead in enterprises which demanded wariness and cunning and pluck, and which promised the discomfiture of some boastful and unloved fellow-student, or the perplexed disapproval of the college authorities, or the entertainment of a college community always keenly appreciative of a diverting sensation. So alive was he to this phase of student activity, and so conspicuous was he among his mates for resourcefulness and courage, that he became, in the popular opinion of his time and in subsequent tradition, the hero of many an escapade with which he had no connection. One instance, however, of strenuous effort quite outside his college duties seems to be well authenticated, and will serve to show the kind of mischievous exploit which was attractive enough to enlist his cooperation.

The president of the college during the first three years of Kellogg’s course was a man of great dignity and reserve. He held himself quite aloof from the students, neither inviting nor allowing any freedom of social intercourse. Partly on this account he was unpopular with the student body, and the solemn reserve in which he intrenched himself seemed, in their eyes, to make any infringement, however slight, of his personal dignity particularly humorous. There was much irreverent laughter, therefore, when it was whispered about on one occasion that the silk hat which the president was accustomed to wear, and which seemed the very crown and symbol of his formal stateliness, had been stolen, and was in the hands of some of the students. When it came to the ears of Kellogg he remarked that if he knew the boys that had the hat he would put it on the top of the chapel spire. Of course the interesting information was not long withheld from him, and in the darkness of a showery night he climbed sturdily up by the slender and insecure pathway of the lightning-rod, and placed the hat on the very top, where, in the morning, it met the dismayed vision of the president, and received the boisterous salutations of the college. That was Kellogg’s contribution to the deed of mischief. To steal the hat was a petty and foolish trick, such as might be perpetrated by a half-witted person, a coward, or a thief; but to carry it through the darkness to the top of the chapel spire required a clear head, a stout heart, good muscle, and nerve, and these Elijah Kellogg possessed, both in youth and manhood.

In reading these books, which tell the substantial history of his life at Bowdoin, it is quite evident that, with all the interest he took in the pastimes and pranks of his associates, he was not unmindful of the high and serious purpose of a college course. He maintained a consistent ideal of personal integrity and helpfulness and truth. It is the repeated testimony of those who were in college with him that his influence upon his fellow-students was in a high degree stimulating and wholesome. “He was,” says one who knew him well in the intimacy of college association, “universally popular, but he had his own chosen favorites, and one characteristic of him was his strong personal affection for them. His soul burned with love to those whom he loved. This was one secret of his power for good, for his influence upon them was always good.” An unaffected scorn of what was mean or false, and an eagerness to recognize and to make the most of every good and generous trait in his companions, were as characteristic of him as was his light-hearted, fun-loving disposition, and it is easy to see why he won both the respect and love of those who were admitted to his friendship.

These engaging qualities of his youth were no less those of his age, and they made him throughout life the friend of boys and the favorite of boys. He never lost the spirit of sympathy and comradeship with young men, and as his home, during the later years of his life, was not far from the college that he loved, he had a double motive to revisit, from time to time, the scene of those labors and frolics and friendships which he had so charmingly depicted in the Whispering Pine books. Accordingly he presented himself, now and then, either unexpectedly or upon invitation, at the door of some undergraduate member of his college fraternity, the Alpha Delta Phi, and became, for as long as he would stay, a welcome and honored guest.

It did not take long for the news to spread that Elijah Kellogg was in college; and then the hospitable room would be visited by many callers, eager to greet the shy, weather-beaten little man, whose heart was always warm for boys, and even the mazy wrinkles of whose face seemed to speak less of age than of kindness. And by the evening lamp an interested circle of students forgot the morrow’s lessons as they listened to stories of olden time, and to quaint words of counsel and comment as they fell from the visitor’s lips. When the circle finally dissolved, and Mr. Kellogg and his entertainers were left alone, a psalm, which seemed somehow to gain new meaning from his reading of it, and a simple earnest prayer, brought the long evening to a fitting and memorable close.

It is interesting, moreover, to notice, as an evidence of the profound regard and affection which the Bowdoin students felt for Mr. Kellogg, that when, in 1901, they published a volume of Bowdoin tales, no other dedication of the book was thought of than the one which inscribes it to the memory of Elijah Kellogg, “who celebrated his Alma Mater in story, honored her by practical piety, and won the hearts of her boys, his brethren.” If he was not eminent in the prescribed studies of the college, neither was he neglectful of them, nor unfaithful to them. Perhaps his enjoyment of college fellowships and his love of fun interfered to some extent with his devotion to the classics and mathematics, which made up a large part of the curriculum, and, in addition, the necessity under which he lay of providing for his own expenses must have diverted a part of his energies from study to manual toil. But whether at work, at play, or at study, he was hearty and resourceful. An incident, as told by himself, illustrates this trait of his character, and, incidentally, introduces the president whose sombre dignity provoked the stealing and subsequent disposal of his hat, as already related.

“I had to work my way through college,” said Mr. Kellogg, “and I boarded with a woman named Susan Dunning. I came to her house one Saturday. There was a deep snow on the ground, and college was to open Monday. She was feeling very blue because her well-sweep had broken. I told her not to mind, I’d fix it. The snow was too deep to get the cattle out, so I took a sled, and going to a wood-lot cut a big, heavy pole, it took a big one, too, for an old well-sweep. I put it on the sled, and tried to haul it back; but the long end dragging in the deep snow made that impossible. So, instead of hauling it, I took hold of the end and started pushing it home. It was hard work, but to make it worse President Allen met me and remarked, ‘Well, Kellogg, I have heard of putting the cart before the horse, but I never saw it done before;’ then he burst into a hearty laugh, and that’s the only time I ever saw him even smile in all the years I knew him.”

Besides President Allen, who was a man of learning and piety, as well as soberness, and whose single laugh, as chronicled by Mr. Kellogg, may perhaps be extenuated on the ground that it was indulged in before the term began, it was a notable group of men under whose influence and instruction Mr. Kellogg came during his residence at Bowdoin. There was Professor Alpheus S. Packard, whose elegant culture and kindly heart and beautiful face relieved the tedium of the Greek class-room, and impressed themselves upon the grateful memories of not less than sixty classes of Bowdoin students. There was Professor Thomas C. Upham, the quaint and shy philosopher, who had in himself so much of the mystic and seer combined with the patient metaphysical analyst that it sent him from time to time into bursts of religious song, and assured his name an honored place among the hymn-writers as well as among the philosophers. There was Professor Samuel P. Newman, who, by precept and criticism, imparted as much as can be imparted of the art of rhetoric, in which Mr. Kellogg was to become so much of a proficient. There was Professor William Smyth, rugged, impetuous, and true, an apostle of abolition, an enthusiastic champion of popular education and, indeed, of every good cause, and, above all, a profound and famous mathematician, about whom Mr. Kellogg relates the somewhat apocryphal story of the “Mathematician in Shafts,” not, as may be seen, to suggest ridicule, but in a sort of fond and amused recognition of his unique and vigorous personality. And finally, not to make the catalogue too long, there was Professor Parker Cleaveland, the distinguished scholar and teacher of chemistry and mineralogy, and a man of idiosyncrasies as striking as were his gifts. In a beautiful memorial sonnet Longfellow said of him:—

“Among the many lives that I have known

None I remember more serene and sweet,

More rounded in itself, and more complete.”

“From Seniors to Freshmen,” says Mr. Kellogg, “all believed in, loved, and were proud of the reputation of the scholarly, kind-hearted, democratic, and, at times, compassionate professor.” And at the close of the chapter which is devoted to illustrations of Professor Cleaveland’s eccentric ways and beneficent influence, Mr. Kellogg is moved to this earnest and affectionate expression of his reverence: “Blessings on thy memory, faithful one,—faithful even unto death,—to whom was committed the gift to stir young hearts to noble enterprise and manly effort; who knew how to train the youthful eye to look upon, and the heart to pant after, the goal thou hadst reached! Those most amused with thy peculiarities loved thee best. From hence removed to the presence and enjoyment of Him whose wisdom, power, and goodness, manifested in the material world, thou to us didst so worthily explain and illustrate, we shall behold thy form and press thy hand no more; but only with life shall we surrender the memory of him who united the attributes of both teacher and friend.”

It is impossible that under the personal influence of these teachers, and of their instruction, young Kellogg, with his frank and susceptible nature, should not have been stimulated to intellectual effort, and to moral earnestness, and that he should not have retained in subsequent life some impress from their vigorous and scholarly and noble characters. How much he owed them in the direction and the development of his powers we may not say. It is never possible to measure, or to estimate exactly, the total influence of a teacher’s life and work upon his pupils. It acts often in ways that do not disclose themselves to our perception; it touches the young men at points and moments of which we do not know the responsive or the repelling significance; it often produces effects which are the very opposite of what we should predict; it falls into the ground and dies, as it were, and years afterward springs up and bears fruit in a form so changed that we do not recognize the seed in the resulting harvest; it is often hidden in the hearts of the young men, and works by way of impulse or restraint so subtly that they themselves are not conscious of it; and so we can never tell to what extent a young man’s character has been formed or modified by the influence of his teachers. But there is certainly some indication of Mr. Kellogg’s own estimate of what he owed to college instruction and stimulus in the ardent and unwavering affection which he always exhibited for his Alma Mater, and which was abundantly reciprocated in the reverent honor accorded to him by the college, and by all its students and alumni. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the college, in 1894, there were more than a thousand graduates assembled at the banquet in a mammoth tent on the campus. Mr. Kellogg had, with some difficulty, been persuaded to be present. He was, of course, called upon for a speech; and when he rose to respond, every graduate, young and old, in the great company was instantly on his feet, cheering and shouting a glad salute. It was a touching and memorable ovation, and the flush of troubled happiness that flitted across his bronzed and wrinkled face was something long to be remembered, as was also his glowing tribute of affection for the college, which was his answer to the welcome of his brethren.

In Mr. Kellogg’s student days the chief literary interest and activity of the undergraduates, and no small part of their more formal social life, centred about two societies, the Peucinean and the Athenæan. Between these two societies there was intense rivalry in securing accessions from among the more desirable members of newly entering classes, in public exhibitions and anniversary exercises, and in the distribution of college and class honors. Each society possessed a considerable library of carefully selected books, and each held regular weekly meetings for literary exercises consisting of essays, poems, declamations, and debates. Kellogg was an active and esteemed member of the Peucinean society, and contributed not a little to the interest of its meetings in the several features of their literary programmes. Mr. Henry H. Boody, of the class of 1842, and subsequently professor of rhetoric and oratory in the college from 1845 to 1854, recalls the fact that at the meetings of the Peucinean society, “we used to consider a poem by Kellogg as a very rare treat,” and then adds that perhaps “our liking for the man influenced our judgment as to the merit of his productions in that line.” However that may be, it is evident that his gifts of tongue and pen were freely exercised during his undergraduate days, and that the charm of them was felt and acknowledged by his college associates.

In Mr. Kellogg’s Junior year a literary magazine, the second venture of the kind at Bowdoin, was projected by some of the students, and made its first appearance, under the name of the Bowdoin Portfolio, in April, 1839. Its advent was heralded, in a manner somewhat figurative and characteristic of the time, by an editorial note, of which the following are some of the first sentences:—

“A short time since, as we were sitting quietly in our room discussing the common topics of the day, we were suddenly surprised and pleased by the entrance of a comely youth, of an ideal nature, that is, made up of the immaterial mind, but who had embodied himself in a visible form. He was arrayed in a neat, simple garb, evidently preferring pure simplicity to ostentatious splendor, and wishing to attract notice, not so much by a showy dress and gorgeous outward appearance, as by the spiritual within, made clear and comprehensible by the outward representation. On his front he bore the name of ’Bowdoin Portfolio,’ and in communing with him we found a most entertaining and agreeable companion. He was just making his debut into the literary world, and it was with modesty and timidity that he declared to us his intentions of speedily making his bow, and paying court to the public.”

There is no indication that Mr. Kellogg was connected with the editorial board of the Portfolio, but there are contributions from him in three of the seven numbers that were published, and all his contributions are of verse. This fact recalls the testimony that has been quoted as to the pleasure with which his poems were received at the meetings of the Peucinean society. Altogether it seems as if, during his college days, his tastes led him to the cultivation of poetry, and as if the impression he made upon his college mates was rather by his verse than by his prose.

One of the poems in the Portfolio is a clever translation of a Latin epitaph upon a moth miller which “came bustling through the window directly into the editorial taper, and fell lifeless upon the sheet of paper.” A part of the epitaph in Kellogg’s verse is as follows:—

“Whose greatest crime was to intrude

Upon a Poet’s solitude;

Whose saddest fortune was to fly

In a Poet’s lamp, and cheated die.

Ah! punishment to rashness due,

How certain! and how direful too!

The silly Moth thus seeking light

Is overwhelmed in shades of night;

So Youth pursuing Pleasure’s ray

O’ertakes grim Death upon the way!”

The Latin of the epitaph is of that obvious kind which an American college boy is likely to write, and there is really more distinction in Kellogg’s translation than in the original.

The other poems contributed by Kellogg to the Portfolio are entitled, “The Phantoms of the Mind,” and “The Demon of the Sea.” They are both vigorous in sentiment and correct in form, and the opening lines of the latter remind us of the author’s early, and, indeed, lifelong passion for the sea:—

“Ah, tell me not of your shady dells

Where the lilies gleam, and the fountain wells,

Where the reaper rests when his task is o’er,

And the lake-wave sobs on the verdant shore,

And the rustic maid, with a heart all free,

Hies to the well-known trysting-tree;

For I’m the God of the rolling sea,

And the charms of earth are nought to me.

O’er the thundering chime of the breaking surge,

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.

It was while he was a student in the seminary that Mr. Kellogg wrote the famous declamation, “Spartacus to the Gladiators,” as well as some others, almost equally famous, of the same general character. It was written for one of the prescribed rhetorical exercises of the course, at which the writer or speaker was publicly criticised by members of the student body, and also by the professor in charge. Mr. Kellogg, always timid at the prospect of open and formal criticism of his writing or speech, greatly dreaded the ordeal, and resolved to write something which should so interest his hearers by its unusual subject-matter as to divert their minds from the thought of criticism. His scheme was completely successful. The students listened with breathless attention, and were dumb when the speech was concluded. To the inquiry of Professor Park if there were any criticisms to be offered, not a voice was raised; and the professor himself remarked that though there were some things, perhaps, that might be said in criticism, yet it was so admirable a specimen of masterful rhetoric that he should say nothing. It has been considered so much of a masterpiece in its kind, that at Andover they still point out No. 20 Bartlett Hall as the room in which it was written.

House on Cumberland Street, Portland, Maine, in which Elijah Kellogg lived when a boy.

There is an unmistakable dramatic quality in the conception and speech of “Spartacus,” as there were hints of such a dramatic quality in some of Mr. Kellogg’s sermons in later years, and it is interesting to note that, in his Senior year at Andover, he wrote a “dialogue,” or brief play, called “The Honest Deserter,” which was performed by the Philomathean Society of Phillips Academy. The occasion of its presentation was considered of so much interest and importance that an elm tree was planted in the Phillips yard in commemoration of the event.

When in his Senior year as a theological student Mr. Kellogg went to Harpswell to preach for some weeks, his personality and his preaching, his love of the sea and his kindly human qualities, so won the hearts of the Harpswell people that they besought him to return to Harpswell after his graduation, and become their pastor. To their urgent request he yielded, being himself much attracted by the people and their home by the sea. It was in 1844 that he was publicly installed over the church, and the official tie of pastor to the Harpswell church was severed only by his death.

EARLY HARPSWELL DAYS

Wilmot Brookings Mitchell

Harpswell, Maine, is a seaboard, almost a sea-girt, town. It is made up of a long, narrow neck of land and forty islands, some containing hundreds of acres, others almost entirely covered by the tide. Indenting the shore of this peninsula and the larger islands are sheltered inlets of deep water well suited to the building and harboring of ships. Hither came, during the first half of the eighteenth century, from Boston, Scituate, York, and other settlements, men and women of Puritan stock and Puritan ways of thinking; and here grew up large families, hardy and God-fearing, some farmers, but most of them fishermen, sailors, and ship-builders.

Elijah Kellogg could not long attend Bowdoin College, only a few miles distant, without being attracted to these sea-going people of Harpswell; for Kellogg was born with webbed feet. When hardly out of the cradle, family tradition has it, he went to sail in Back Cove, Portland, with a sugar-box for a boat and his shirt for a sail. As a youngster he would often steal to the Fore Street wharves to watch the ships, and he was never so happy as when listening to the yarns which the sailors spun. He says of himself, “At ten years of age I began to climb the rigging, and at fifteen went to sea.” His years in the “fo’c’sle,” with all their perilous and disagreeable tasks, only intensified his love for the water. As a Freshman he took supreme delight in sailing with a good comrade, on a Saturday afternoon, in his little cat-rigged boat, the Cadet, among the islands of Casco Bay.

One of these half-holiday expeditions affected, as it happened, his whole after-life. The Cadet, belated by wind and tide, ran ashore on Birch Island, and “Captain” Kellogg and crew, supperless and weary, sought shelter at the house of Captain John Skolfield. Mr. Kellogg never forgot how cosily the light from the house that evening shone through the hop vines growing over and around the windows. The hospitable islander gave the wayfarers a warm welcome and a plentiful supper; for which hospitality, before the evening ended, Kellogg, full of stories of college and the sea, made his host feel well repaid. Thus began his acquaintance with the Birch Islanders,—the Skolfields, Curtises, and Merrimans,—an acquaintance which was to ripen into a life-long friendship. The men on this island, hardy, powerful, and fearless, at once became heroes in the admiring eyes of this venture-loving student. After this he spent many happy hours building boats, gunning and fishing with Captain John, or spinning yarns and reading aloud with “Uncle Joe” Curtis,—a man who read every book he could get hold of and who remembered everything he read.

From Birch Island to Harpswell Neck, where Eaton’s store and the church were located, is but a short row; there Kellogg often went to buy something for his boat, or to worship on the Sabbath. Before long he had many friends and admirers upon the mainland; for these people had but to see the sharp-eyed, brown, wiry “colleger,” and hear his stories, or listen to his earnest and eloquent exhortations in the prayer-meeting, in order to love him. It was with them, as well as with him, love at first sight; and by the time he was a Sophomore they had plighted troth. Learning that he was to study for the ministry, they must have him for their preacher; and he, half jokingly perhaps, told them if he lived to get through the seminary and they built a new church, he would come to preach for them.

After graduation at Bowdoin, Kellogg began the study of theology at Andover. When his course at the seminary was near its close, Professor Thomas C. Upham, who had been so stanch a friend of the Harpswell church that Mr. Kellogg once said it owed its very existence to him, came to Andover with a message from the Harpswell people that the timber for the new church was on the spot, and they still wanted him for a preacher. The bearer of the message evidently saw in the young preacher the salvation of the Harpswell church; for he reënforced this reminder of the promise Kellogg had made in his student days by the emphatic prophecy that God would curse him as long as he lived if he did not go. Influenced somewhat by these prophetic words, but probably much more by his love for the place and the people and the opportunity he saw of doing good, he turned away from a call to a much larger church and went to Harpswell, where, as he said many years later, he found that “obedience is sweet and not servitude.”

Although Mr. Kellogg, in response to this informal invitation, began at once to supply the pulpit in the old church, a formal call to settle as pastor was not extended to him until the next year. The reason for this becomes apparent upon an examination of the church records.

The original Harpswell church and parish were at this time passing through a transition period. Formed in 1751, the parish was at first identical with the town. The preacher’s salary and other church expenses were assessed by the town officers as taxes. But later, other churches having been built and other denominations having sprung up, many citizens objected to being taxed for the support of the minister, and some absolutely refused to pay such taxes. A troublesome question concerning the control and ownership of the first church building also arose between the town and the parish. Accordingly the supporters of the Congregational church organized a new society and erected a new church building.

This church was dedicated September 28, 1843. For this dedication the following poem was written by Mr. Kellogg:—

“Here, ’mid the strife of wind and waves

Upon a wild and stormy sod,

Beside our fathers’ homes and graves,

We consecrate a house to God.

“Here, on many a pebbly shore,

Old Ocean flings his feathery foam,

And close beside the breaker’s roar

The seaman builds his island home.

“’Mid giant cliffs that proudly breast

And backward fling the winter’s spray,

’Mid isles in greenest verdure dressed,

’Tis meet that rugged men should pray.

“Its spire shall be the last to meet

The parting seaman’s lingering eye,

The first his homeward step to greet,

And point him to a home on high.

“Here shall the force of sacred truth

Defeat the Tempter’s wildest rage,

Subdue the fiery heart of youth

And cheer the drooping strength of age.

“And when the watch of life is o’er

May we, where runs no stubborn tide,

No billows break, nor tempests roar,

In Heaven’s high port at anchor ride.”

The records show that on April 25, 1844, with Professor Upham as moderator, it was “moved and voted that the church of the Centre Congregational Society in Harpswell do hereby invite and call Mr. Elijah Kellogg to settle with them as their pastor in the Gospel ministry and [do agree] to pay [him] by subscription $300 a year for four years from the first day of June, 1844.” This call to what proved to be a long and fruitful pastorate Mr. Kellogg, on May 4, 1844, accepted in these simple and earnest words: “Brethren and Beloved: I have considered your call to settle with you as a minister of the New Testament. It appears to me to be the will of God pointed out by his providence that I comply with your invitation, which I accordingly do, praying that it may be a connection full of blessed fruits both to pastor and people.”

Elijah Kellogg’s Church at Harpswell, Maine.

The new pastor was ordained on June 18, 1844. He entered with enthusiasm into his work. Among these rugged farmers, fishermen, and sailors, he sought in all ways to expound and exemplify the teachings of Him who many years before taught the fishermen of Galilee. On the Sabbath he preached sermons so interesting and eloquent that people came in boat loads from the islands to hear his words; and he entered familiarly and sympathetically into the home life of his parishioners. “His little boat might be seen in all weathers flitting to and fro between mainland and islands as he made the circuit of his watery parish in visits of friendship or of consolation, to officiate at a marriage or a funeral. He was heartily welcome in every home, for he knew their domestic life, and seemed to be a part of it; and he talked of the sea and of Him who made it in a way that brought him close to the hearts of his people, and made religion seem a natural and practical and important part of daily life. He rebuked wrong-doing, recognized and applauded every good act or effort, composed differences between neighbors, helped in manual toil, comforted the afflicted, gave to the poor,—and all in such a simple, unconventional, and genuine fashion, that his people felt that he was one of them, only better than the rest.[1]”

[1] From an address by Professor Henry L. Chapman, delivered at the Maine State Congregational Conference, September, 1901.

The pastor of the early forties was often formal, arbitrary, and autocratic, seeking to drive rather than to lead his flock. Between pastor and people there was too often a great gulf fixed. But this humorous, unpretentious, sincere man did not hold himself as of finer clay than his people. He liked to plant and reap with his parishioners. To pull rockweed and pitch hay and chop wood, to swing the flail and hold the plough, were not beneath his dignity.

One Sunday during these first years of his pastorate, just after reading the usual notices, he said: “Widow Jones’s grass, I see, needs mowing. I shall be in her field to-morrow morning at half-past four with scythe, rake, and pitch-fork. I shall be glad to see all of you there who wish to come and help me.” The next morning found a good crew of men and boys in the field ready for work. Among them was a man six feet two in his stocking-feet and weighing some 250 pounds. Captain Griggs we will call him. As they were working up the field near each other, the captain said, “Parson, I am going to cut your corners this morning.” The little wiry parson, who had served a good apprenticeship upon his uncle’s farm in Gorham, whet his scythe and kept his counsel. The big captain didn’t cut any of his corners that day. Indeed, the story goes that before noon the man who thought that he could mow around the parson, dropped under a tree, exhausted by the terrific pace that Kellogg set.

Before he had completed the first year of his ministry, Mr. Kellogg was elected a member of the school committee, on which he served several years. That he sought to do his duty on the school board faithfully is attested by the resolution—heroic it will seem to some—which he recorded on December 8, 1844. “Having never till this time been fully convinced of the importance of mathematics in strengthening the mind and preparing it to investigate truth, and never having been able to conquer my dislike for them till led to them by the study of philosophy and an impression of the interdependence of all philosophy and all science, I now begin at the bottom and determine to push my researches as far as possible and to set down whatever may be worthy of note. I this day commenced Emerson’s Arithmetic in order to be prepared to do my duty thoroughly as one of the superintending committee.” As committeeman, he did more than make a perfunctory visit twice a term. He kept his eyes open for the alert, promising, studious lad. Such a boy he encouraged, advised concerning his studies, and often urged to go to Master Swallow’s school in Brunswick and fit for college. These boys he picked carefully, for he didn’t believe in “wasting nails by driving them into rotten wood.”

From the first of his ministry to the very end, Mr. Kellogg showed an instinctive knowledge of boys, and originality in dealing with them. Any just estimate of his work and character must rate high his tact in handling and influencing boys. Wherever he preached, boys were quick to see that he was their friend, a man after their own heart. They soon found that this unconventional, simple, eloquent little man, who had a way of throwing his arm over a boy’s shoulder and walking home from the evening meeting with him, was more than an ordinary preacher. They found that he could understand them. They could tell him their jokes and their serious plans, and he could see through their eyes and hear through their ears. They found that he, more perhaps than any other man they had ever known, was all the time at heart a boy himself; that he was interested in them not simply as a professional duty, but because he couldn’t help it. He loved boys, was happy in their companionship, and delighted to talk of his own boyhood and college days,—of the time when the frogs by croaking “K’logg, K’logg,” called him away from school, or when he in recitation informed his dignified professor that Polycarp was one of the many daughters of Mr. Carp. He would swim and sail and farm and fish with the boys in his parish, and then, at an unexpected moment, but in a manner not repellent, he would kneel down in their boat or in the field by the side of a cock of hay or a shock of corn and pray with them.

Many men to-day who were born and bred in Harpswell like to tell of the way he won and kept their friendship. Here, for example, was a boy whom he was taking to Portland in his boat; the youngster felt very proud, for his grandmother had intrusted to him her eggs to take to market. But alas! in disembarking he dropped the basket, and the eggs were smashed. The boy’s extremity, however, was the preacher’s opportunity. By paying for those eggs from his own pocketbook, he saved the young marketman no end of humiliation, and bound him to his soul with a hoop of steel.

If one may judge by his journal and correspondence, no work that Mr. Kellogg did during his long life afforded him greater satisfaction or yielded larger returns in affection and gratitude and right living than his work with boys. When, for instance, he had been on Harpswell Neck less than a year, he heard that a schooner had put into Potts’s Point, some ten miles below his home, with a boy on board who had broken his leg. He knew that this boy on a small schooner in a strange place would need sadly the comforts of home. He hastened to him, brought him to his boarding-place, put him in his own bed, and nursed him as he would have nursed a son. When the boy was able to go to sea again, having no money, he could repay his benefactor for all the trouble and expense he had been, only with words of kindness and gratitude. Years afterwards, however, when Mr. Kellogg was preaching in Boston, a well-dressed man and woman came into the sailors’ church, and appeared much interested in the sermon. At the close of the service they came forward and spoke to the preacher. The boy had now become a man—the mate of a large ship. The bread which the young minister had cast upon the waters now returned to him after twenty years, in the words of affection and encouragement with which this man and his wife expressed their gratitude, also in the $50 which, as they bade him good-by, they left in his hand.

For some years Bowdoin College, recognizing Mr. Kellogg’s power in getting at the heart of boys, had the custom of sending to him some of the students whom it rusticated; and his strong, manly character brought more than one boy to his better self. That his treatment of these boys was not exactly that of Squeers, this instance will show. One young fellow whom the college sent him was especially rebellious at first. Through cheap story papers he had come cheek by jowl with old Sleuth and his boon companions, and he sought to emulate them by carrying a revolver and a dirk knife. Mr. Kellogg told him that as he would not find any Indians or many wild beasts down there, he had better surrender his weapons. This the young man did after much reluctance. During the first day, Mr. Kellogg left him to himself, as he was inclined to sulk. In the evening he began to talk to the boy indifferently at first, afterwards kindly. All the time—lover-like—he kept edging up nearer to him on the big sofa, and finally in his genuine, whole-souled way, put his hand affectionately on the lad’s shoulder. To such treatment the young fellow was not accustomed. It was so different from his over-stern father’s that it threw him entirely off his guard. He could not withstand the man’s kindly interest and genuine manner. His rebellious spirit was broken. The boy dreaded his father’s rebuke, and the next day, unknown to him, Mr. Kellogg wrote to his mother, telling all about her son and urging that the father write to him kindly and not sternly. A few days after this the young fellow was surprised and delighted to receive from home a letter of forgiveness and encouragement.

On July 4, there was to be a celebration in Portland. The boy wished but did not expect to go. “Well,” said Mr. Kellogg one day after they had been speaking of the matter, “I am afraid you can’t go. I have no authority to let you. But, then, I really want to attend that celebration myself, and I can’t be expected to leave you at home alone.” When the day of celebration came, the student and the preacher could have been seen tramping the streets of Portland, both, no doubt, having a right royal good time.

A few years ago, the heart of the aged minister was uplifted by the assurance that he had dealt aright with this high-spirited lad. A successful business man, the vice-president of a large western railroad, came many miles to look again into his kindly face and to tell him that those weeks of companionship full of honest counsel marked the turning-point in his life.

For the first five years of his life in Harpswell, Mr. Kellogg boarded at the home of one of his parishioners, Mr. Joseph Eaton. Here his mother spent the summers with him, his father having died in 1843. In 1849 he bought a farm of thirty-five acres at North Harpswell, and at once began to build a house that he might provide a suitable home for his lame and aged mother. The location of this house is an attractive one. It is on the western side of Harpswell Neck, a half-mile or so from the main-travelled road. From it the land slopes gently an eighth of a mile, perhaps, to the shore of Middle Bay. From the windows of the house which he here built, one peeping through the oaks and spruces on a summer’s day may see to the west, across the sparkling water of the channel, the green sloping bank of Simpson’s Point, or to the south Birch and Scrag islands and several of the other 363 which dot the waters of Casco Bay. The house itself is a wooden, two-story, L-shaped farm-house facing the west, bespeaking nothing of luxury, but large enough to be airy in the summer, and in the winter a good place, as Captain Rhines would say, in which to ride out the storm.

Much of the material of which the house is made Mr. Kellogg brought here from different parts of his parish; some strong timbers from Ragged Island, three miles out at sea, fine sand for his mortar from Sand Island, and the door-stone from Birch. Nearly all of the larger timbers in his house this preacher cut and hauled himself. And when they were on the spot, seventy-five of his friends and neighbors, giving him a good surprise, as did those of Lion Ben in the Elm Island stories, came and hewed the timbers and framed his house. Little wonder is it that this house, with its attractive surroundings and its pleasant associations, was ever to him the most beautiful place on earth.

He lived here with his mother and housekeeper until 1852, when his mother died. This bereavement took a strong influence out of his life; for the tactful, firm-willed mother had played a large part in moulding the character of her impetuous, venturesome son. In 1854 he married Miss Hannah Pearson Pomeroy, daughter of Rev. Thaddeus Pomeroy of Syracuse, New York, previously pastor of the Congregational church of Gorham, Maine. Three children were born to them: a son who died in infancy; Frank Gilman, at present in business in Boston; and Mary Catherine, the wife of Mr. Harry Batchelder of Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts.

The circumstances of Mr. Kellogg’s marriage are characteristic. While he always maintained a due respect for women, he was preeminently a man’s man or perhaps better a boy’s man. It is not surprising, then, to be told that his wife was “recommended to him.” A friend of his at Gorham, rallying him a bit on his bachelorhood, asked why in the world he did not marry. “Oh,” said he, “I can find no one to have me.” Whereupon his friend replied, “There is your old schoolmate, Hannah Pomeroy of Syracuse, a minister’s daughter, well educated, a good school-teacher, and smart as a whip; just the woman for a minister’s wife.” What had been the preacher’s previous plans concerning matrimony is not known, but before long he took a trip to Syracuse, and when he returned, the bargain was practically made. Though apparently so businesslike a transaction, this proved to be for more than forty years a happy union. His friend spoke truly. Had Mr. Kellogg searched many years, he could not have found a better helpmate than Hannah Pomeroy. Attractive, sincere, energetic, practical, she was a prudent, encouraging wife and a wise, loving mother.

Hannah Pearson Pomeroy Kellogg.
Wife of Elijah Kellogg.

The folk-lore of Harpswell contains many stories of this minister’s daring on sea and land and of his original ways in dealing with both saints and sinners; so original, indeed, that one rough old admirer on Ragged Island, whom Mr. Kellogg had influenced for good in a way that no other minister had ever thought of doing, said that when Parson Kellogg died, he was going to carve upon his tombstone three letters—”D. F. M.” The last two were to stand for “Funny Minister.”

This daring parson had upon his farm a bull that rendered himself extremely obnoxious to visitors who found it convenient to reach his house by crossing the pasture. The bull, therefore, must be disciplined. The preacher first harnessed Mr. Taurus to the front wheels of a heavy cart, preparatory to putting him over the road and showing him who was master. But before the guiding ropes had been adequately arranged, the bull on a mad rush took to the woods, leaving in his trail fragments of cart-wheels and harness. The little minister, however, was not thus to be outdone. The next day, at flood-tide, with tempting fodder he allured the bull to the end of the wharf and in an unguarded moment shoved him into the bay. An excellent swimmer, he then quickly jumped astride the bull’s back. By grasping his horns and intermittently thrusting his head under water, with a prowess which a “broncho-buster” might well envy, he conquered his steed. Thus, as all stories rightly end, they lived happily together ever afterwards.

Of this pastor’s unconventional methods in accepting and dispensing gifts of charity, the following are illustrative. One afternoon, just before tea, he happened into the house of a master ship-builder in his parish, a man of property and influence. The old gentleman was on the best of terms with the young preacher, and after passing the time of day, began to banter him on the condition of his boots, which were muddy and somewhat the worse for wear. “Parson, what makes you wear such disreputable-looking foot-gear?” he said. “Throw those boots away and let me get you a new pair.” The parson waited till later before he fired the return shot. After all were comfortably seated at the tea-table and he had said grace, he asked to be excused for a moment and went to the sitting room. There a good fire was blazing upon the hearth, and near by were the master-builder’s best shoes. Quickly came off the parson’s old boots, and into the fire they went; and as quickly went on to stay the master-builder’s best calfskins.

One winter day while on Orr’s Island, he got an inkling that a family there was in distress. By skilful inquiry he learned that the father had been drinking badly, and the mother and children needed food and fuel. Something must be done at once to relieve them. Going to the house of a well-to-do parishioner, he requested the use of his horse and sled for an hour or two. When they were ready, he quickly drove up to the man’s woodpile and loaded the sled generously, while the owner stood by in wonderment. The only explanation given was: “That family down there need fuel badly. You’ve got a plenty, and I’m going to haul them down a good load.” And that was explanation enough, for Parson Kellogg offered it.

Although so familiar and informal in his social and pastoral relations, as a preacher he never hesitated to point out to his people their duty in language that was unmistakable. Soon after the new church was built, for example, he told them that increased privilege means ever increased responsibility. “God has given you,” he said, “a commodious and elegant place of worship. Why? That you might sit down and admire it and be proud of it? Do that, and He will wither you to the root. Do it, and He will send leanness into your souls. My dear friends, we had better, like our Puritan forefathers on the coast of Holland, kneel down among the rocks and seaweed in the cold winter to pray to God with the humble spirit with which they prayed than to worship Him here in peace and comfort, surrounded with tasteful decorations, without that humility. You have heard of congratulation and praise as much as you ought to hear. I wish you to look at your increased responsibility. As God has made you first in point of privilege, be not by abusing those privileges the last to attain salvation.”

In his pulpit, with plain-spoken words such as these, and with quaint phrases, and apt illustrations drawn from the farm, the forest, and the sea, this preacher quickened the conscience, and broadened the sympathies, and strengthened the faith of the farmers, fishermen, and sailors, who heard him gladly. As a preacher, “he seemed,” says one who knew him well, “a prophet in the authority with which he spoke, an evangelist in the tenderness with which he appealed to the conscience and set forth the promises of the Gospel, a poet often in the simple beauty and grace with which he portrayed the conditions of human life, and discoursed of the deep things of God.”

THE SEAMAN’S FRIEND

George Kimball

At its annual meeting, May 17, 1854, the Boston Seaman’s Friend Society accepted the resignation of Rev. George W. Bourne, pastor of the Mariners’ Church and chaplain of the Sailors’ Home. The board of managers then began the search for “a suitable man” for the vacant position, and their choice fell upon Rev. Elijah Kellogg of Harpswell, Maine.

Mr. Kellogg began his duties in September of that year, with his accustomed earnestness, and under his ministry the attendance at the church increased, and a new impulse was given to the society’s work.

He first appeared before the society at its twenty-seventh anniversary, held in Tremont Temple, May 30, 1855. A large audience was assembled. President Alpheus Hardy introduced him in complimentary terms, and he made an eloquent address. His “suitability” as the seaman’s friend and pastor is shown in these extracts: “The greater portion of my life has been spent among seamen, either at sea or on shore. The first personal effort, to any extent, I made for the salvation of souls was while teaching among a community of sailors. The first sermon I preached was to sailors. The first couple I united in marriage were a sailor and his bride. The first child I baptized was a sailor’s child. The first burial service I performed was over the body of a seaman. The society with which I have been connected during the last eleven years is with scarcely an exception composed of sailors and their families. There is not a house in the parish in which the roar of the surf may not be heard, and in many of them the Atlantic flings its spray upon the door-stone.... The men who interest seamen and do them good have not any recipe for it; neither can they impart it to others. It is all instinctive. They love the webbed feet, and the webbed feet love them.”

Mr. Kellogg was at this time forty-one years old. His pleasing personal appearance and his hearty, rugged, forceful utterance made a favorable impression upon his hearers.

The task he had undertaken was by no means an easy one. It involved hard and constant work, often of a kind little, if at all, like that of the average clergyman. On the Sabbath there were in the Mariners’ Church three services for public worship, and the Sunday-school. In addition to this work upon the Sabbath, Mr. Kellogg conducted a social religious meeting in the reading room of the Sailors’ Home upon one evening of each week, and in the winter lectured occasionally in the church upon topics of vital interest. He visited sailors upon shipboard and in hospital, offered the comforts of religion to the sick and dying, and often communicated to loved ones the parting message they would never otherwise have received. For this work the salary was necessarily small, and the material equipment not of the best; but Mr. Kellogg did not hesitate. He threw himself into the work with zeal and enthusiasm.

From the establishment of the Seaman’s Friend Society in 1827 to July 12, 1852, religious services were held at the Sailors’ Home, but upon the latter date the building was burned. The church at the corner of Summer and Sea streets, which had formerly been owned and used by the Christian Baptists, was soon after purchased, and on December 30, 1852, was dedicated to the work for sailors. A church building, in these days, like the modest bethel in Summer Street would be regarded as quaint in appearance and ill-adapted to its uses. It was inferior, in many ways, even to other churches of its day, but it was easily accessible to those to whom it especially ministered (wharves to the south were then much more fully utilized by shipping than they now are), and was in the centre of a favorite residential district; for Fort Hill and surrounding streets were at that time mainly occupied by pretentious dwellings.

The Sailors’ Home, when rebuilt, was a large brick structure upon the eastern slope of Fort Hill, at 99 Purchase Street. Here, with Mr. John O. Chaney as its superintendent, many of the brave carriers of the commerce of the world were comfortably housed and cared for. The Home had a large reading room and library, and besides providing good board and home comforts, it did much from time to time for the relief of shipwrecked and destitute sailors. Often hundreds of sailors were here. The very year Mr. Kellogg began his work it sheltered 2458, and during his chaplaincy of nearly eleven years 25,358 were beneath its roof.

In urging the need and importance of such an institution as a haven of rest, a “port in a storm,” Mr. Kellogg once said: “Suppose twenty-five seamen from Calcutta, with beard and hair of 130 days’ growth, hammocks, canvas bags, sheath knives, chests lashed up with tarred rigging, redolent of bilge water, with a monkey or two, and three or four parrots, should drive up to the Revere House in a North End wagon, and say, ’We want to stop here; our money is as good as anybody’s,’ would they stop there? Would their money be as good as anybody’s? I trow not. Let them, repulsed from the Revere, go to the Marlboro,—a temperance, pious house, prayers night and morning,—and tell the proprietor if he does not take them in they must go to a place that leads to a drunkard’s grave and the drunkard’s hell, would they be taken in there, think you? This shows the need of a Sailors’ Home, does it not?”

When Mr. Kellogg had been at work awhile, Captain Andrew Bartlett of Plymouth, a retired ship-master, was employed by the society as a missionary helper. Always faithful and zealous, as “a lieutenant to Mr. Kellogg,”—so he styled himself,—Captain Bartlett proved of valuable assistance. With his aid libraries were placed upon shipboard to be managed by Christian sailors, and the minor details of the work went forward successfully.

Another fruitful source of increased life and enthusiasm in the work came early in Mr. Kellogg’s pastorate. It was a body of young men drawn by the personal magnetism of the popular preacher, inspired by his earnestness and devotion, and moved by their own desire to be of service in the good cause. He issued no special call, made no urgent appeal, for these helpers. One by one they came, impelled by the promptings of the Holy Spirit. They rallied like a forlorn hope in a desperate encounter, each feeling that his services were needed. They were ready for any service their Divine Guide and their beloved leader might require of them, should it carry them even to “moving accidents by flood and field.” They had heard the “still, small voice,” and had responded, “Here am I; send me.”

Captain Bartlett early reported: “The young men of the church are Mr. Kellogg’s body-guard. They are a sort of flying artillery. They visit the receiving-ship, the Marine Hospital, and other places. They hold meetings, and talk with sailors.”

Mr. Kellogg in an annual address before the society said: “An army of young men are putting their strength to the wheel of a difficult and hitherto well-nigh discouraging work. It was feared by many, when these efforts began, that they were the outgrowth of romance and the love of novelty, and would be of transient duration; but they have assumed the same enduring character as the other departments of labor. At the hospital, on board the receiving-ship, at the Mariners’ Church on Sabbath evenings, they have entered heart and hand into this work, and, from their very youth, adapted to the impulsive nature of seamen, they have been in the hands of God a most efficient instrumentality for good.”

This army of young men grew very rapidly during the revival of 1858, and by the beginning of the Civil War was of creditable size. At the Sunday evening prayer-meetings it made itself especially felt. On these occasions the church was always crowded. Ministers of the Gospel, merchants, young people, and captains of ships sat side by side with men whom every wind had blown upon, from the equator to the pole, all uniting in fervent prayer to the same great Father, all striving to bring each other to a knowledge of the truth. Not an evangelical denomination in the city was unrepresented, and it is impossible to form even an approximate estimate of the amount of good accomplished, for these meetings were exceptional both in number of attendants and in interest shown.

Elijah Kellogg at Forty-three.
1856.

But war came, and it found the Mariners’ Church patriotic to the very core. Mr. Kellogg had to report that sixty-eight of his“body-guard” had enlisted to fight for the preservation of the Union, sixteen of them teachers in the Sunday-school. In 1864, in his address before the society, he said: “At the beginning of the war there were connected with the Mariners’ Church a body of young men, landsmen, who were deeply interested in the conversion of sailors and enjoyed their confidence and affection. They, with a single exception, entered the army. Poor and without patronage, they enlisted as privates. Five of them have been promoted.”

Those connected with the Mariners’ Church when the war opened will never forget the stirring scenes in the church meetings or the eloquent words of patriotism and faith with which the pastor bade his “boys” Godspeed as they went forth into the great struggle. One Sunday evening in April, 1861, he spoke feelingly of the impending crisis. He was so prophetic, outlining so accurately what afterward proved to be the extent and course of the secession movement, that many of his hearers have since thought him to have been almost inspired. When he had finished, he requested three of his “boys” who had enlisted, one of whom had that very day been admitted to the church, to step to the desk. Then, amid a scene such as is rarely witnessed in a sacred edifice, he talked to them personally, while the large audience showed great sympathy and the liveliest interest. When the enthusiasm had reached its highest pitch, he drew from under his desk three revolvers and passed them to the young men, bidding them go forth in the name of God, in a cause which he declared to be as holy as any that ever a people contended for. In 1865, referring feelingly to the services of these young men in the field, he said: “They departed with the prayers and good wishes of the congregation. One of them, but nineteen years old, fell at Gettysburg; another,[2] having been twice severely wounded, has returned with honor, and the third, having received three wounds, and led his company at the storming of Fort Fisher, still remains a captain in the service.”

[2] Readers will be interested to know that Mr. Kimball, the author of this chapter, is here referred to.—W. B. M.

The work was often attended by interesting and sometimes humorous incidents. During a meeting in the reading room of the Home one evening an intoxicated sailor created a disturbance at the door. He wanted to enter, and had to be held back by force. The meeting closed, and the “flying artillery,” under the leadership of Mr. Kellogg, was about starting for the nine o’clock prayer-meeting at the rooms of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Tremont Temple. The inebriate took it into his head to go too. He was reasoned with, but without effect. “You fellows have got a good thing,” said he, “and I want some of it.” The leader and his “body-guard” started, and sure enough, the disciple of Bacchus followed. Mr. Kellogg protested, but in vain, and finally ordered “the flying artillery” to take the double-quick. The man then showed that he, too, could sprint a bit even if he did happen to be “loaded.” He managed to keep the party in sight, and although he met many obstacles and collided with a horse-car in crossing Washington Street, he succeeded in landing a fairly good second. He was not allowed to enter the prayer-meeting, however, as he was still inclined to be noisy, but was “held” in an adjoining room. The young men got him back to the Home after the meeting, and he again declared it his purpose to have religion anyhow, in spite of opposition. Next morning he appeared, demanded a pen, and with the air of a usurper of a throne about to banish all who had in any way opposed him, placed his name upon the temperance pledge. That evening in the prayer-meeting he requested prayers. He gave his heart to Christ, became a devoted worker, and a year afterward, returning from a voyage, was found to be still in the faith.

But sinners had to be brought to repentance ordinarily. They rarely came unsought, like this poor wayfarer, and thus Mr. Kellogg and his helpers always found plenty to do. It was an inspiring scene when the leader and his “body-guard” set out for the prayer-meeting upon the receiving-ship Ohio or returned therefrom. In going, they usually met at the Young Men’s Christian Association, proceeding thence via “Foot and Walker’s line,” two by two, keeping step to the music of their own voices. “The Old Mountain Tree,” “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” and many other popular songs of the day, as well as hymns, were sung. Among the favorite hymns was “Say, brothers, will you meet us?” It had that stirring chorus, “Glory, glory, hallelujah.” This was sung a great deal, and it finally became the foundation of the famous “John Brown Song,” to the rhythm of which thousands marched in the great war for the nation’s life.

No small part of Mr. Kellogg’s success in this work came from his intimate knowledge of the seaman’s nature. Sailors are in many ways peculiar, and in order to be of service to them a worker must proceed understandingly. They regard themselves as in a measure set apart from their fellow-men. One of them once wrote:—

“I am alone—the wide, wide world

Holds not a heart that beats for me;

I’ve seen my brightest hopes grow dim,

As fades the twilight o’er the sea.”

That Mr. Kellogg understood this loneliness and had a large sympathy for the men “that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters,” these eloquent words of his well show: “In respect to the great mass of seamen, they neither own land, build houses, nor rear families. They neither give nor receive those sympathies and attentions which create among men a mutual dependence and attachment. When they are sick, no circle of neighbors and friends watch by their bedside and minister to their necessities, but the walls of the hospital, if on shore, receive them and conceal their sorrows from observation. No kindred follow them to the grave and erect the memorial stone. They are not, in the expressive language of Scripture, ’gathered unto their fathers,’ but they are buried on the shores of foreign lands, or amid the everlasting snows of the pole, or in the abyss of ocean, slumbering in nameless sepulchres and mausoleums of the mighty deep. Like the winds that bear and the waves that break around them, they are the visitors of every clime, the residents of none.... The knowledge of the community at large in respect to seamen is too often gleaned from the exaggerated descriptions of novelists.... Every man has in his heart home feeling. It is an old-fashioned thing. He drew it in with his mother’s milk. He learned it at his father’s knees. Even sailors are men. They did not spring from the froth of the sea, like Venus. They had mothers and fathers that loved them and prayed for them. It is the heart makes home. It is the heart makes friends in the world. The heart makes heaven.”

Sailors are ever among the bravest of the brave. Great as is the appreciation of the American people of the bravery of the men who lined up behind the guns of our warships in the great war which kept the Union whole, it is not half great enough.

Neither can we overestimate their loyalty in all great crises of the nation’s history. It was President Lincoln who pointed out the fact that in all the general defection of the first period of secession not a single common seaman proved false to his flag.

In a prayer-meeting at the Mariners’ Church while the war was in progress a landsman lamented its effect upon the “Jackies.” A man-of-war’s man arose and said: “What is war to me? What is war to my shipmates? It brings no increase of peril—only another kind. We have always faced danger and death and disease. What is it to me whether danger comes from storms or from batteries? I can kneel down between the guns and pray as well as in my room at the Sailors’ Home.”

For patriotism and bravery wherever shown, Mr. Kellogg had the greatest admiration. Besides the large number of landsmen connected with his church who entered the service, over two hundred of the inmates of the Sailors’ Home joined the army and more than six hundred the navy during the war. With many of these, Mr. Kellogg kept in touch through frequent correspondence, and looked after their personal needs. He loved them all. He often sent necessities and delicacies to his“boys” at the front. In one of the early battles,[3] one of the young men of whom mention has been made as receiving arms at his hands in a Sunday evening prayer-meeting was wounded. He at once visited the hospital to which the young man had been taken, secured a furlough for him, provided him liberally with necessities, brought him to Boston, and sent him to his home in Maine for a visit to his father and mother.

[3] Here, again, the reference is to Mr. Kimball.—W. B. M.

The results of Mr. Kellogg’s great work for seamen were often not apparent. His sailor parishioners were scattered throughout the world. In speaking of this, he once said: “If a person on shore is converted, it immediately becomes known to a church of perhaps six hundred members; if he leads a devoted Christian life, his influence is felt by thousands. But these Harlan Pages of the ocean, who pray with messmates, speak good words to shipmates in the middle watch, maintain a Christian life on board frigates which have been compared to floating hells enlivened once in a while by a drowning—who writes their memoirs? What stone records their virtues? What periodical chronicles their death? They slip quietly to heaven unnoticed and unknown. Their bier is a plank across the lee gunwale, their mausoleum the ocean, their epitaph is written in water. And when the report circulates in the forecastles of different vessels, some old sailor, dashing a tear from his eye with his shirt-sleeve, exclaims to his shipmates, ‘Well, he has gone to heaven. He saved my soul, and he would have saved the whole ship’s company if they had listened to him.’”

The visible results of Mr. Kellogg’s work, however, were from the first encouraging. During the winter of 1858, the great revival was fully felt. Many were brought to Christ. The next year the interest continued, not only at the church and the Sailors’ Home, but at sea. At the Home 276 signed the temperance pledge and 95 were converted. Good work was also done at the hospital in Chelsea. That winter word was received that four members of the Mariners’ Church were holding prayer-meetings on board the Hartford, flagship of the squadron then in Chinese waters, and that a lieutenant, the fleet surgeon, a ship’s doctor, a gunner, two midshipmen, six petty officers, and twenty-five seamen had been converted. Prayer-meetings were then being held upon fifteen other men-of-war. The next year also showed good results. In 1861, Mr. Kellogg was able to report seventy-four conversions at the Sailors’ Home, fifty-five on the receiving-ship Ohio, twenty-eight at the hospital in Chelsea, thirty-seven at sea, and a number at the church. Statistics show the conversion of 725 during his ministry of eleven years.

The high esteem in which Mr. Kellogg was held by the other clergymen of Boston was well expressed in 1862 by Dr. Todd of the Central Church. Speaking at an annual meeting of the society from which Mr. Kellogg was forced to be absent by a serious attack of lung fever, Dr. Todd said:— “I regret exceedingly the absence to-day of one who is the life and soul of this work in this city, whose treasured experience, given in his racy way, is wont to enliven this anniversary. I regret exceedingly the cause of his detention. But I may take advantage of his absence to bear some slight testimony to the preciousness of the influence which he is exerting. Apart from his successes among seamen, for which he is eminently qualified by the characteristics of his nature, as well as the tastes of his heart, he is diffusing an untold influence in other spheres. I presume that there is not an evangelical clergyman in this city who cannot gratefully trace among his people, and especially among the young men of his congregation, the quickening and healthful influence of the pastor of the Mariners’ Church.”

A year later the decline in the merchant marine began to be seriously felt. It was said to be due to the sale of a large number of vessels to the English and the change in destination of others, many going to England and the Continent which formerly would have come to Boston and New York. This diversion of commerce was believed to be due to the prevailing high rates of exchange. Then, of course, a great many of the men who had manned our merchant vessels had been absorbed by the army and navy. Just before this decline began, a competent authority had estimated that throughout the world at least one hundred and forty thousand merchant vessels of all kinds were afloat, manned by a million men, and that one-third of these were under the flag of the United States.

These changes in our commerce and this falling off in American seamen greatly lessened the number of inmates at the Sailors’ Home, and seriously weakened the Mariners’ Church. Then, too, a new element had occupied Fort Hill and the adjacent streets. The growth of business was crowding people southward and westward, comfortable homes giving way to commercial establishments. These things, together with an intention which Mr. Kellogg had long cherished of entering upon a literary career, caused him to think seriously of resigning his position. During the summer of 1865 he did so, and was soon after succeeded by the Rev. J. M. H. Dow.

The foregoing is but a glimpse of Elijah Kellogg’s work in Boston. In its entirety, that work is known only to God and the Recording Angel. Its influence was widely felt upon sea and land. Thousands of sailors upon lonely waters were made happier by it, and up among the hills, under the trees, at many a farm-house window, sad faces that looked out and watched for their dear ones’ coming brightened at the remembrance that they had been led to Christ through the efforts of this seaman’s friend.

Mr. Kellogg was a saintly, lovable man, and but for his modesty, shunning, as he often did, the leading churches of the day, because of what he termed their “starch and formality,” he would have been named and known among the great preachers of his time.

AS SEEN THROUGH A BOY’S EYES

William Oliver Clough

When and under what circumstances I made the acquaintance of the Rev. Elijah Kellogg I do not now recall. The place, however, was Boston, and I persuade myself that the time was the winter of 1856-1857, during what was mentioned in the newspapers of that day as the “Finney revival.” I was then an errand boy in a jewelry store, a member of the Park Street Church Sunday-school and congregation, and spent many of my evenings out—for I slept in the store—at the rooms of the Young Men’s Christian Association, then in Tremont Temple. It was probably at the last-mentioned place that Mr. Kellogg came into my life, and now, looking back over the years that have passed, I acknowledge that I have cause for gratitude that I did not resist the love and friendship that he generously bestowed upon me.

Those of us, his friends and admirers, who recall the dignified manners and solemn utterances of the good old clergyman of our grandfathers’ days—on whose approach to the old homestead we fled like a brood of frightened chickens—do not find in him a counterpart. He was like yet unlike them, and it was the unlikeness that attracted young people to him and compelled them whether they would or no to follow where he led. It was that he had been a boy—the old school clergyman never gave evidence of such weakness—and that it seemed no condescension on his part to be a boy again with boys, when by so being he could keep them out of mischief and as he was wont to say “headed up the stream.” More than this he knew how to “get at boys.” He had a purpose in it all. Many boys did not in my boyhood days—and I assume that they are the same in all generations—take kindly to being told that unless they turned over a new leaf and joined the church they would surely go to the devil. Mr. Kellogg knew this and was ever on the watch to discover their plans and ambitions, and, apart from sermons,—for he could get them in in the proper place,—encourage them to strive for success, while incidentally warning them of the pitfalls in their path. In a word, he had an intuitive knowledge of the character of the person upon whom he would impress the better way of life, and knew just how much religious talk he would stand and still come to him with his burdens and for advice. His attitude always seemed to be that religion—as men profess it—was in a large degree dependent upon education in honesty and sincerity of purpose in the things that are nearest at hand, in the affairs of everyday life, that if the twig were but rightly bent, thus the tree would incline. He was indeed a reverend schoolmaster.

Hardly a week passed between the date I have tried to fix and the time I left Boston in 1870, when, if Mr. Kellogg was in the city, I did not meet him somewhere in his wanderings. I do not recall that I ever attended services at the Mariners’ Church on Summer Street, over which he was for many years pastor, on a Sunday morning or afternoon. Sunday evening was the time. It was then that the larger half of the Park Street Church boys and girls ran away, as the annoyed deacons put it, and went to Mr. Kellogg’s meeting. No matter what the weather happened to be or what the attractions were at home, the young people into whose lives Mr. Kellogg had forged his way went where he was to be found. They had done their duty by their own church, and they must do their duty by Father Kellogg; and so it happened that year after year the Seaman’s Bethel was crowded to overflowing on Sunday night, the middle of the house being reserved for Jack, and the wall pews for the boys and girls. Incidentally, and always in the right place, the preacher gave us the advice that was withheld in social and friendly intercourse. In an up-to-date way of expressing it, he “got it all in.”

Father Kellogg, having followed the sea in his youth, had a good many odd ways of saying things that were pleasing to us. Here are some that I now recall:—

The writer said to him one day: “The deacons at Park Street are greatly offended because you take us away from them on Sunday night, and have expostulated with us.” “That reminds me of an old couple in our state” (“our” is accounted for by the fact that the writer is a native of Gray), he replied. “The wife was a strapping woman of more than two hundred pounds and the husband was a little fellow of not much over one hundred pounds. She abused him past the endurance of a block. Her tongue was forever going. She gave him no rest, no peace. Some one said to him, ’Why don’t you turn about and give her as good as she sends?’ and he replied, ’Oh, but it amuses her and it doesn’t hurt me any!’ And that is how it is with the deacons and me. The boys and girls will come to the Bethel just the same.” He was right about it.

Father Kellogg was standing in his accustomed place one night in front of the pulpit, watching the ushers and showing anxiety through fear that sittings would not be found for all comers, when, after looking about, he pointed to one of the pews, and this is what he said:— “Six persons may be comfortably seated in those wall pews. There are only five in that pew. Why won’t you take another reef in your mainsails, ladies, and accommodate one more?” The ladies blushed and reefed.

One night, when temperance was the theme, he paused, and directing his conversation to some boys who were whispering, remarked: “I sometimes wonder how it will be with young men who cannot behave in Boston, where there are so many policemen to watch them, when they get into that far country where there are no policemen. You’d better cast anchor, boys.”

This anecdote is on the writer. My companion was one of the young ladies of Park Street, and I was feeling just a bit proud of myself. We were on hand in time, and had good seats against the wall. Distress came upon me by reason of new and tight-fitting shoes. I had slipped them off and put them under the seat, and was as peaceful and contented as a bug in a rug. Presently the crowd came, and there was a demand for seats. Spying other boys and me, this is how he fixed us: “Here, John, Thomas, Ezra, Henry, and William, come this way and sit on the pulpit steps.” All the other boys started. I kept my seat. I was in a fix. Then he spoke a second time. “Come, come, no hanging back!” Taking the shoes in my hand, I went as directed. The boys and girls laughed, and he comforted me by saying: “I sat on the pulpit steps many a time when I was a boy. It didn’t hurt me, and it won’t hurt you.”

One night just before the benediction he said very earnestly: “I wish the congregation would exhibit less haste to be dismissed. When the last verse of the hymn is being sung, you throw your books into the rack with a nervous thud that sounds like the ’ram-cartridge’ of a regiment of raw militia. Kindly hold the books in your hands until after the benediction.”

On one occasion when he was talking about politeness as apart from selfishness, this is how he got back at some of us, “Now I suppose if you were travelling in a crowded horse-car, and a tired mother with a baby in her arms, or a feeble old man with bundles in his hands, got aboard, you would give up your seat even if you had paid for it—but I happen to know that there are some of your elders who won’t do it.” I never knew whom he fired that shot at.

A transient man (speaking in meeting one night) bemoaned the fact that some of the tunes to which hymns were sung were theatre refrains, and unholy. “What!” exclaimed Father Kellogg, “you wouldn’t give all the good music to the devil, would you?” The stranger sat down.

One cold, blustery day Father Kellogg came to the store on Milk Street where I was employed, with a tale of sorrow. He had discovered a sick family. There was no food or fuel in the house, and he had no money in his purse. He must raise $3 immediately. Every one contributed on the instant, and he obtained nearly $4. There was a tear in his eye when he went out, and probably having in mind that some of us were theatre-goers or billiard-players, or something else—he turned to me, and remarked aside, “Old Satan will be about $4 short to-night!”

It should not be understood from the foregoing that my recollection of Father Kellogg and my admiration for him are based on and began and ended with a few little anecdotes incidental to evening meetings at the church over which he was the honored pastor. I knew him in the broad field, the world. He frequently spent an hour of the evening with me at the store which was my only home, and where half the evenings in the week I was alone as watchman after closing hours; here he often related his experiences as a sailor—much of which was afterward woven into his stories—and corrected the compositions I had written as a student at the Mercantile Library Association then located on Summer Street. More than this, he knew most of the boys and young men of the association, and dropped in occasionally to hear them speak his declamations and to encourage them in their studies. Later he was wont to call at my boarding-place, as he did at boarding-places of other homeless young men in that great city, to look after me and make me feel that some one cared for me. In those years I went occasionally with him and others to his week-day meetings at the Marine Hospital in Chelsea to“help out in the singing,”—as he was pleased to put it,—and to more other places than it would be interesting to mention here. On most of these occasions he “stood treat” on soda or ice-cream somewhere on the tramp, and, as I now discover, was always endeavoring to keep us interested and out of reach of temptation. In after years and following my departure from Boston, I used to find him at the Athenæum on Beacon Street where—after giving up his church duties—he spent most of his time when writing his books. These meetings were the joy and pride of my life, and from them I always obtained new courage to persevere in my profession. And here let me say that of all the boys of 1857-1870 I know of but one who has made a misfit of life; and over his misfortunes I throw, as I know Father Kellogg would were he still among us, the broadest mantle of charity.

Of Father Kellogg as an earnest and inspired preacher, a consecrated man with a message to men, and of his greatest sermons, others may speak. He was a modest and unassuming man who did not recognize in himself his full power to move and convince men. Physical fear stood in the way. He often expressed himself as greatly embarrassed when officiating over large and fashionable congregations, and he said to me, following his magnificent discourse in a series of meetings at Tremont Temple, that when he approached the desk, his knees shook so that he feared he should fall in his tracks. However this may have been, he got control of himself before he had spoken twenty-five words. All of embarrassment fled before the earnestness of his words and purpose. It was—and I speak with the knowledge that many others consider his sermon on the “Prodigal Son” his masterpiece—one of the greatest efforts of his life. He realized that he was in contrast with Dr. Stone, Dr. Manning, Dr. Kirk, Dr. Neal, and others, and that he must give the best he had. The sermon made a deep impression upon all his hearers.

It was a comparative parallel of a brook and the career of man in weird and forceful language, in imagery that was entrancing, in striking passages, and with the lesson every moment in the foreground,—man and brook at their sources, the place of their birth.

Morning. He dwelt upon its beauty at sunrise, and the secluded depths of the forest, and sought the birthplace of the brook. Then with the child and the tiny stream he lingered and dwelt in graceful, dreamy thought, in which he compared their purity, pondered upon the dangers and pitfalls beyond, half undecided whether to venture farther or cease to be. Having determined that it would be cowardly to resist destiny, he followed the murmuring stream, listened to its complaints and made note of its troubles. It was the career of man. As it flowed on, and he wandered beside it, he listened to the song of birds, the murmuring wind, and found himself in harmony with things divine. Anon, the scene changed, the harmony was broken, the temptation to recklessness was observed on every hand. The little brook had increased in strength and commenced its complaining. It was being bruised against boulders, rushed over logs and through chasms, over ledges, alongside of marshes and across the quicksands of meadows, under water-wheels and bridges, thrown mercilessly over precipices and dashed against every substance in its path.

Noonday. He mused with it, gathered admirers about it and discovered that it entered into partnership with other streams as men and women enter into the partnerships of life. He listened to its whispered songs by day and sought its harmonies by night, he sympathized with its fault-finding because of the impurities which flowed into it from cities and villages, admired it when it became a broad expanse, and enforced the lesson of man’s journey through life.

Evening. Standing on the shore of the ocean, the tide receding, he gazed far out toward the horizon, and in descriptive beauty I cannot reproduce, saw the river meet and mingle with the sea, losing its identity; saw the streets of shining gold, the great white throne and the crown for those who are faithful unto death.

The outline of one other of Father Kellogg’s great sermons still lingers in my mind and attracts my thought. Paragraphs from it are discoverable in the stories he wrote late in life. It was prepared for the purpose of presenting the cause of the Seaman’s Friend Society before a great convention in the Boston Music Hall. He was to speak to a cultured audience of men and women from all parts of the state, and in the presence of some of the best scholars and thinkers in his own profession. He felt that he would be criticised in comparison with other speakers, and was therefore determined to do himself and his alma mater credit, and withal present his cause, so as to reach the hearts and pocketbooks of his hearers. I did not hear the sermon at its original delivery, but later he used it for the same purpose in the churches. I heard it at Park Street, and was so attracted and impressed by its beauty of language and eloquence when spoken by him that I went to the Mount Vernon Church when he delivered it there. This gives the impression it left upon my mind.

Through the career of one sailor, learn of many. He pictured the child in the cradle, the love and hope of a doting mother; followed him to school, saw him develop in mind and muscle; sailed cat-boats, set lobster-traps, and dug clams with him. He talked and dreamed with him about other lands and climes beyond the boundary of their vision, and entered into his hopes and ambition to become the master of a ship. Passing briefly over his coasting voyages, he portrayed him in port surrounded by sharks and bad women, and in the whirl, where if he listens and yields to the tempter, he becomes lost to himself and a sorrow to the mother who bore him. He spoke of his needs, of the associations that should environ him, the necessity for a snug harbor home in every port, and then, when an able seaman, he accompanied him on a voyage to a foreign land.

Then he presented, in vivid colors, beautiful, weird, and awful pictures of the sea such as no man who has not witnessed them may discover in the storehouse of his knowledge. The vessel drifts to-day in a calm; there is little to do on shipboard, and so, half homesick, the sailor looks upon the glassy deep as in a mirror, and sees faces and forms of those he loves. Meantime, there are omens that indicate a coming storm, and anxiety is depicted on every face. Night and the storm! Then the awful picture of the raging deep; the vessel climbing mountain waves and anon pitching into the trough of the sea; the dark and ominous clouds, the angry winds, the mingled prayers and supplications of the crew; the promises of a better life if spared to reach land, the wreck, the rescue,—all in vividness, in rapid and burning oratory that held a landsman as in a vice, moved him to tears, and blotted from his mind all else save the speaker and his theme. Into port, far from home and kindred, and the old story of forgetfulness of promises when in the presence of temptations, and, in conclusion, a masterly plea for pecuniary aid from those who had it in their hearts to better the sailor’s environments.

During the war of the rebellion, Father Kellogg’s patriotism and zeal for the cause of his country was of the most pronounced type. Whenever a regiment from Maine was due to march through the streets of Boston, whether outward or homeward bound, his affection for the old home and the boys of his state, excited him beyond self-control. He met the command, if informed of its coming, at the railroad station, crossed the city with it, remained close to the ranks and at every halt talked with and cheered the boys. He made speeches to several regiments, when reviewed on the Common, and on one occasion—I was present to greet a cousin in the ranks—he broke down completely, and wept like a child. It was pretty safe to say after the departure of a regiment from Maine that Mr. Kellogg had not a “penny to his name.” He made speeches and offered prayers at the unfurling of the flag, and spoke parting words of affection and advice to seamen of his congregation and young men of his Sunday evening meetings, many of whom “died with their wounds in front.”

The last of my several visits with Father Kellogg at his home at North Harpswell was on August 5, 1899. On my journey thither, I talked freely with the driver of the hired carriage—G. W. Holden, a brother of the mystic tie—and said to him: “I should think the people of such an up-to-date place as this would demand a younger preacher, more of a society man than Mr. Kellogg.” He became enthusiastic at once and replied: “Why, bless you, brother, the people of this place are all of one mind in this matter. Like myself they had rather hear Mr. Kellogg say ’amen,’ than the finest sermon any younger minister could possibly preach. Why, people come from far and near to hear him, and every now and then he has a request from some of them to deliver his discourse on the ’Prodigal Son.’ It is a most remarkable sermon. I could hear it twice a year, and hunger for a third.”

But here we were at the end of our pilgrimage, at the very door of his residence. It was nine miles from the boat-landing, half a mile from the main highway through a strip of woods, and in a romantic and secluded spot; an old-fashioned, unpainted farm-house of the fathers, with large, high-studded rooms, and furnishings after the fashion of the city. Everything bespoke comfort.

Mr. Kellogg met me at the door with warm greeting, and when he made out my identity through the mists of years, embraced me with the enthusiasm of a child, put his arms about my neck and kissed me upon the cheek. It was the same warmth and affection with which he greeted the old Park Street Church crowd of young people in good old times. “Come in! come in!” and then our tongues were loosed and it was a race for life, for my visit was necessarily to be brief, to see who could do the most talking. I think—mind you, reader, I am not positive about it—that he did the most of it; at any rate he conjured with names of old-time companions and friends whom I had forgotten, but whose faces and forms were instantly upon the screen before me, and spoke with tenderest affection of boys and girls, old men and matrons, whom we had known and loved, and who have long since paid the debt of nature. Oh, that the living of the good old times could have joined me on that pilgrimage!

He told me it was his purpose to proclaim“glad tidings” to men while life lasted; that he had engaged to preach the next year; that he expected to officiate on Sunday at Bowdoin College, and that his health was such—deafness being his only apparent infirmity—he had reasonable hope of becoming a centenarian. He recalled incidents innumerable with which I am familiar, and related with manifest pleasure that the deacons of Park Street undertook to put a stop to the “running away” of their young people on Sunday nights, and, with merriest twinkle of the eye, said, “their lectures fell on stony ground. Some of the young people replied that they were born in the Bethel, others that they were looking for a chance to sing, and there were a few—and I fear you were one of the number—who always turned up where the girls were. Anyhow, I had the crowd, and I loved every one in it as though he were my own.”

Then, in softened accent, as though he feared he had wronged those deacons in thought and spirit, he said practically this: “Ah, but those same deacons were good and true men. They were sympathetic, they were liberal to a fault, and I never went to one of them for aid in my work to return empty-handed. Then there was my old friend, Alpheus Hardy, of the Mount Vernon Church. I verily believe he would have turned all he had in the world over to me had I solicited it.”

The conversation ran on and on in changing moods. I feared that Brother Holden and our lady travelling companion would begin to think themselves in for a half-day of steady waiting, and so I began to break away. This was the hard part of it all. He clung to me and put his arms about me, urged me to dismiss the driver and sleep under his roof, and finally exacted a promise that I would come again next year, if in that vicinity, and tarry longer. Our adieus were then spoken, and he stood upon the porch and waved his hand in parting.

All that I have here written is, as I view it, a eulogy on the character and career of Father Kellogg, and yet I may be pardoned, considering my long acquaintance, tender attachment and admiration for the man, if, as attorneys put it, I sum up:—

He was one of nature’s noblemen; he was incapable of deceit; he lived a life above reproach. His one great purpose was to make himself useful to the human family. To this end he sought out boys who were liable to go astray, and it may be said in all seriousness, and with impressive emphasis, that he succeeded in the mission to which he was consecrated. The seed he sowed ripened in the lives of those in whom it was planted, and, granting that each in turn confers the same blessing upon his children, Father Kellogg’s influence must continue on and on to future generations, making the world wiser and better because he has lived in it. His gentle chidings, his forgiveness of seeming neglect, his patience when troubles were upon him, his sympathy for those who were in sickness, sorrow, need, or any other adversity, his hopefulness when in financial stress, his devotion to his invalid wife, his anxiety for his children, his unselfishness, his never failing cheerfulness and steadfast faith in God, his submission by which he ever discovered the silver lining in the dark cloud, his determination to preach the Gospel to the end of his days,—all, all, have lodgment in my heart; and so, when I think of him, it is not as of one dead, but one who lives, lives in the affections of kindred and friends, in beneficent influence still abroad in the world, in deeds: not dead, not dead:—

“There is no death,

The stars go down to rise upon a brighter shore.”

Elijah Kellogg’s Home at Harpswell, Maine.

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.”

[4] See [page 47].

“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.”

For some time before his resignation from the pastorate of the Mariners’ Church he had been thinking of trying his hand at a boys’ story, and in January, 1867, the first chapter of his first story was printed in Our Young Folks, a magazine published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. This story, “Good Old Times,” at once became popular with the young readers of this magazine. It is one of the best stories that Mr. Kellogg ever wrote. It is largely a narrative of facts—the story of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, the great-grandfather and great-grandmother of Elijah Kellogg, in their struggle at the beginning of the eighteenth century to cut a home for themselves out of the forest wilderness of Narragansett No. 7, where the town of Gorham, Maine, now is. Of Scotch-Irish descent, young, brave, and resolute, “strong of limb, strong in faith, strong in God,” this couple left their home in the north of Ireland to escape persecution, poverty, and famine. They braved the terrors of the sea and the savages to found a home in the new country. Accustomed as they had been in Ireland to regard a landowner as the most fortunate of men, they deemed it a rare privilege to secure land in Narragansett No. 7, by paying “but little money and the balance in blood and risk and hardship.” They gladly dared the privations of a savage wilderness to obtain some soil they could call their own.

Little wonder is it that the story of how they did this proves of interest to the boys of New England; it is the story of what their own grandfathers and great-grandfathers endured, enjoyed, and achieved. Here, to be sure, they read of no fairyland peopled with elves and sprites, with ogres and goblins; here is no fairy godmother with glass slippers and pumpkin coaches, but a land of flesh-and-blood men and women, of real boys and girls, of Indians with war-whoops, and tomahawks, and scalping-knives—all true, but all enchanted by the wand of the story-teller. What better fun for the boy reader than to join this resolute family as they set out from Portland, and go with them into the primeval forest; Elizabeth on horseback with a babe in her arms leading the way, little ten-year-old Billy just behind driving the cow, and Hugh with a pack on his back, a musket slung across his shoulders, and another child in his arms, acting as rear-guard. Here in the woods were hard work, peril, and poverty; but here, too, were all kinds of interesting things for a boy to see and do. To help build the log house, shingle it with hemlock bark, and stuff the chinks with clay and brush; to see Hugh make the big “drives” and prepare for the “burn,” an exciting and important event in the making of a forest home; to watch the fire as it rushed through the clearing, and to lie in wait, gun in hand, near the woods and watch the “raccoons, woodchucks, rabbits, skunks, porcupines, partridges, foxes, and field mice ’on the clean jump,’ all running for dear life to gain the shelter of the forest, while a great gray wolf, which had been taking a nap beneath the fallen trees, brought up the rear”—this was rare sport. To wear leggings and breeches of moosehide; to gather spruce gum and maple sap; on moonlight nights to shoot the coons that were stealing the corn; to see the men cut and haul the masts, those immense trees upon which the king’s commissioner had put the broad arrow, those trees so large that upon the stump of one of the largest, so said Grannie Warren, a yoke of oxen could turn without stepping off—this was fun indeed for little Billy. What boy, as he reads the story, does not wish that he were the son of a pioneer, even if the corn and meat did now and then get so scarce that the McLellans were obliged to dine upon hazelnuts, boiled beech leaves, and lily roots. In those good old times, men and boys were not forced to betake themselves to tents and camps to get away from our “modern conveniences,” to test their resourcefulness and ingenuity in devising ways and means to secure food and shelter. From the boy’s point of view that pioneer life was one long, glorious vacation of “camping out.”

And then there were the Indians, who, whatever else they did, kept the life of that day from becoming tame and commonplace. They furnished, when friendly, no end of entertainment for the youngsters. What fun the boys had playing beaver in Weeks’s brook, and how delicious the venison was when roasted by old Molly the squaw! Under the instruction of friendly Indians, Billy learned to give the war-whoop, to hurl the tomahawk, and to acquire great skill with the bow. If he could not, like Robin Hood, cleave a willow wand at a hundred yards, he could “knock a bumblebee off a thistle at forty.” And when Billy was fast coming to man’s estate, the Indians, instigated by the French, dug up the hatchet that had been buried for nineteen years; then there was a call for all the coolness, cunning, and heroism that this pioneer life had developed in boy or man; then Beaver, as the Indians called Billy, and his savage playmate, Leaping Panther, were compelled to pit against each other their prowess and cunning. Narragansett No. 7, right in the Indians’ trail, was the scene of many an encounter, often bloody and disastrous in those days, but more exciting than a Captain Kidd expedition when looked back upon through the eyes of the twentieth-century boy. Driving the oxen, with a gun resting on the top of the yoke, planting and reaping and every moment expecting to hear the war-whoop, creeping serpent-like through the grass and stealing noiselessly under an overhanging bank in order to discover an Indian ambush—the story of all this arouses the heroic in a boy’s nature.

After “Good Old Times,” from Mr. Kellogg’s pen the books came thick and fast,—the Elm Island stories, the Forest Glen, the Pleasant Cove, and the Whispering Pine series,—so that by 1883 there were twenty-nine in all.

While writing these books, the author lived in Boston, on Pinckney Street, during the winter, often supplying neighboring pulpits, and spent the summer at his Harpswell home. His favorite workshop was the Boston Athenæum. Here he often wrote from morning till evening. One of his college mates has said: “Kellogg when in college was strenuous and persistent in whatever he undertook. I remember when he was composing a poem or preparing an essay, he gave his whole soul to it; his demeanor showed that he was absorbed in it and absent-minded to everything else, until that one thing was done.” This power of concentration now stood him in good stead. Often he worked upon his stories fifteen hours a day. Upon his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” he spent a year and a half; but by making his days long and concentrating his thought upon the one task before him, he was sometimes able to turn out a book in three months.

The style in which these books are written is not faultless. The participles are sometimes“dangling” or “misrelated.” The uses of“most” and “quite,” of “and which” and the “historical present,” are not always according to the rhetorician’s rules. Flaws may also be picked with the way some of the characters are introduced, transitions made, and statements repeated. But considering the number of stories the author wrote in these sixteen years, such mistakes are surprisingly few. Mr. Kellogg had an ear sensitive to the flow of a sentence and a memory in which words stuck. The rhythm of his prose is noticeably good and his vocabulary excellent. Well acquainted alike with farmers and sailors, with mechanics and students, he could put fitting words into the mouth of each. The language of his characters does not stultify them: his carpenters are not fishermen; his sailors are not landlubbers; his farmers are not caricatures. He knew well the “down-east” vernacular. In the use of the dialect—if such it may be called—of rural New England, Tim Longley and Isaac Murch can give points even to Hosea Biglow.

All of these books are not of the same merit, and concerning them boys’ opinions differ. Next to “Good Old Times,” perhaps the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove stories are most after a boy’s heart. An island far enough out at sea so that the dwellers thereon cannot easily supply their wants and consequently have to use inventiveness and daring, is an interesting element in any story, whether it be“Robinson Crusoe,” “Masterman Ready,” or “Lion Ben.” Although not a tropical land abounding in cocoanuts, turtles, and parrots, Elm Island affords abundant opportunity for boys’ play and boys’ work. “Does such an island really exist?” writes a mother to the author. “No,” he replied, “only in my own imagination.” And yet for many boys it does exist. There is no need to describe Elm Island to the boys of New England. They have trod every foot of it and know its every nook and cranny. They know that it is six miles from the Maine coast, “broad off at sea,” and that in the early days fishermen used to land there and make a fire on the rocks and take a cup of tea before going out to fish all night for hake. They have looked admiringly upon its rich coronal of spruce, fir, and hemlock, the large grove of elms on its southern end, and the big beech tree which often has in it as many as ten blue herons’ nests at one time. They can tell you of its precipitous shores, its remarkable harbor, its beautiful cove into which runs the little brook where come the frostfish and smelts, and where the wild geese, coots, whistlers, brants, and sea-ducks galore come to drink. That big rock where the waves roar hoarsely is White Bull; and this smaller one, white with the foaming breakers, is Little Bull.

They know that “it was a glorious sight to behold and one never to be forgotten in this world or the next, when the waves, which had been growing beneath the winter’s gale the whole breadth of the Atlantic, came thundering in on those ragged rocks, breaking thirty feet high, pouring through the gaps between them, white foam on their summits and deep green beneath, and—when a gleam of sunshine, breaking from a ragged cloud, flashed along their edges—displaying for a moment all the colors of the rainbow.... And how solemn to listen to that awful roar, like the voice of Almighty God!”

This island and the neighboring mainland Mr. Kellogg peopled with likable and interesting characters. Strong, good-natured Joe Griffin, beneath whose hat is ever hatching a practical joke, Uncle Isaac Murch, full of Indian lore, skilled in the use of tools, always able to look at things from a boy’s point of view, Captain Rhines, John Rhines, Charlie Bell, and old Tige Rhines are dear to many a boy’s heart. And Lion Ben, powerful, overgrown, agile, slow-tempered, warm-hearted Lion Ben! Almost as soon could a boy forget Leather-Stocking as forget Lion Ben.

Situated as was Narragansett No. 7 some ten miles inland, in “Good Old Times” Mr. Kellogg had but little to say of sailors and the sea. But Elm Island and its sea-loving people afforded him large opportunity to use the knowledge of ships and seamen gained during the three years he had sailed before the mast, or the twenty he had ministered to sailors in Harpswell and Boston. He knew all the pleasures which the sea and shore afford inventive, resourceful boys like John Rhines and Charlie Bell. Fishing and swimming, making kelp siphons, spearing flounders, shooting coot and geese, building boats and sailing them into the teeth of the gale—no author has told of these more entertainingly. Mr. Kellogg loved the sea dearly and knew the words and ways of sailors well. “Here,” says a reviewer, “is an author who knows just what he is writing about. He never orders his sailors to lower the hatch over the stern or coil the keelson in the forward cabin.” He liked nothing better than to build an “Ark” or a “Hard-Scrabble,” load her with lumber and farm produce, man her with Griffins and Rhineses, a snappy crew of home boys, who would “scamper up the rigging racing with each other for the weather earing,” and sail away to the West Indies. Through hurricanes, blockades, or pirates, they would sail with colors flying, reach their port in safety, sell their cargo for a handsome profit, and come back laden with coffee, molasses, and Spanish dollars to gladden the hearts of the dwellers on Elm Island and in Pleasant Cove.

The Wolf Run stories depict characters and events similar to those in “Good Old Times.” They tell of the way a handful of Scotch-Irish settlers in the mountain gorge of Wolf Run on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, about the middle of the eighteenth century, built up their homes; and of the “fearful ordeals through which they passed in consequence of their deliberate resolve never with life to abandon their homesteads won by years of toil from the wilderness.” Here, as in “Good Old Times,” is a scattered community of a few families, frugal and hardy, hating injustice and loving righteousness, to whom food and shelter of the rudest kind are luxuries, and life itself is often at stake. These stories are full of vivid pictures of frontier life, making the “birch” and the “dug-out,” devising ingenious makeshifts for tools and furniture, trapping the wolf and beaver, building and defending the stockade. Here are many enlivening accounts of Indian battles, ambushes, midnight attacks, hair-breadth escapes, and long, hard chases on the trail of the Mohawks or the Delawares. Across the pages of these stories walk sinewy men of oak, in moccasins, buckskin breeches and coonskin caps, ready to fight or fall, keen of eye and lithe of limb, skilled in forest lore, tireless on the chase, sagacious in finding or covering a trail, keen marksmen, “delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger.” Sam Summerford, Ned Honeywood, Seth and Israel Blanchard, Bradford Holdness, Black Rifle,—twin brother of Cooper’s Long Rifle,—are characters which live in a boy’s memory. These are stories of strong lights and dark shades; but they are true to the life of that day, and show well “what the heritage of the children has cost the fathers.”

In the Whispering Pine stories the author relates the struggles, achievements and pranks of a group of students in Bowdoin College. In these books he has given us a good look into the lives of students in a small college in the first half of the nineteenth century, and has preserved in the amber of his story many Bowdoin customs.

He pictures vividly the early Commencement, when nearly the whole District of Maine kept holiday. From far and near people came in carryalls and stages, on horseback, in packets and pleasure boats, to join in the college merry-making. Hundreds of carriages bordered the yard, and barns and sheds were filled with horses; hostlers were hurrying to and fro sweating and swearing, and every house was crammed with people. To Commencement came not only the beauty, wit, and wisdom of the district, but also those who cared little for art or learning. With dignified officials, sober matrons, and gay belles and beaux came also horse-jockeys, wrestlers, snake-charmers, gamblers, and venders of every sort. The college yard was dotted with booths where were sold gingerbread, pies, egg-nog, long-nine cigars, beers small, and, alas! too often, for good order, beers large. While Seniors in the church were discoursing on “Immortality,” jockeys outside were driving sharp trades and over-convivial visitors engaging in free fights.

In his “Sophomores of Radcliffe” Mr. Kellogg tells us of the Society of Olympian Jove, whose customs perhaps sprang partly from the author’s imagination and partly from his experience. In those days the initiate was made to rush through the pines and ford the dark Acheron, and was carefully taught the signals of distress—signals which James Trafton, with work unprepared, the morning after his initiation, much to the merriment of the class, proceeded to give to the irritated professor by squinting at him through his hand.

Perhaps the most interesting of the early Bowdoin customs described in these books is the “Obsequies of Calculus.” This custom was in vogue many years, and a headstone can yet be seen upon the campus marking the spot where the sacred ashes were consigned to dust. At the end of Junior year when Calculus was finished, the Junior class gathered in the mathematical room and there deposited their copies of Calculus in a coffin. The coffin was then borne sorrowfully to the chapel, where amid wailing and copious lachrymation a touching eulogy was pronounced. The orator was wont to discourse of the “gigantic intellect of the deceased, his amazing powers of abstraction, his accuracy of expression, his undeviating rectitude of conduct,” his strict observance of the motto that, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Then came the elegy in Latin; after which, amid the grief-convulsed mourners, the coffin was placed upon a vehicle called by the vulgar a dump cart, and the noble steed Isosceles, which “fed upon binomial theorems, parabolas, and differentials, and every bone of whose body and every hair of whose skin was illustrative of either acute or obtuse angles,” drew the sacred load to its last resting-place. The funeral procession, consisting of the college band, Bowdoin artillery, the eulogist and elegist, and the Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior classes, moved slowly down Park Row, through the principal streets of the village to the rear of the college yard. Here the books were “placed upon the funeral pyre and burned with sweet odors, the solemn strains of the funeral dirge mingling with the crackling of flames.

‘Old Calculus has screwed us hard,