the open windows, the balmy air and the melody of birds. I have been hoping and praying that I may be enabled on the morrow to commence aright the duties of the new term."

"December 14, 1839.-Three of our students have formed a little coterie for the purpose of examining and discussing theological subjects. We meet twice a week at my room. We also have once a week an evening exercise in homiletics, at my room, when one of us recites the substance of an original discourse, the other two officiating as hearers."

of thrilling interest It will be the year year of the great

"January 3, 1840.—I anticipate this as a year to me, no doubt the most momentous of my life. of my commission as a minister of God, the first work of my life. For the first time I shall emerge from the preparatory stages in which I have heretofore been occupied, and put on the garb of practical manhood."

"March 26, 1840.-I have now pretty much completed the severer duties of the term, having finished six sermons. I have been delivering two lectures on Jeremy Taylor before a select club. They were extemporaneous, and each two hours long."- "I have read seven critiques upon characters in Shakspeare before another club formed for English criticism. I am beginning to go for clubs and coteries. Solitary study I find does not bring out the whole man. Combine the solitary with the social is the rule."

From the preceding letters the reader will perceive, that notwithstanding Mr. Homer's intention to spend the greater part of his life in the chair of literary instruction, he yet applied himself to the duties of a preacher with all the enthusiasm which he had hitherto devoted to his more private studies. The laws of the Theological Seminary require each member of the Senior class to write four sermons during the year. This small number is demanded, because it is esteemed far more important for a minister, in his novitiate, to write well, than to write much. But Mr. Homer wrote three times the number of sermons which the law requires, and became as eager to preach them, as he had been desirous hitherto of avoiding public observation. So long had he been confined

to preparatory labors, that he became impatient for the active duties of his profession, and seemed to leap for joy at the prosHis mind sprung like a bow He had been judicious here

pect of doing good in the pulpit. hastening to discharge its arrow. tofore, in the mode of spending his vacations, he had devoted them to the recreating of his mind and his body, and had regarded as somewhat comical the remark of Wyttenbach, that vacations were designed for teachers to relax their powers, and for pupils to review their studies. But at the close of his first Senior term at Andover, when his mind had been agitated by the severest affliction of his life, and he had still performed an unusual amount of intellectual labor, he was persuaded to spend the seminary recess in pastoral duties at South Berwick, Maine. The first vacation in which he evidently needed repose, was the first in which he refused to take it. To several of his friends, he gives the following account of his labors: "I preached a third service in Boston last Sabbath evening, and although Monday and Tuesday I felt as well as ever, yet I think I must have over-strained myself, and prepared for the lamentable result. On Wednesday I had a touch of the real bronchitis, which, since that time has assumed the various forms of cold, cough, hoarseness, sore lips, till at length it has deepened into that most unpoetical, vexatious disease, a cold in the head. I conduct a prayer meeting on Sunday evenings, and preach a lecture on Friday evenings. When this interesting cold in my head allows me to do anything, I enjoy myself much in reading and writing. Last week I wrote two sermons, beside reading Carlyle, John Foster, Longfellow's Hyperion, (choice)."-"I ought not in any case to have spent my vacation in the labors which I have been performing, especially when I was as unwell as when I left Boston. I have very narrowly escaped a fever since being here."

But notwithstanding his want of repose, he appeared at the seminary during its summer session, as elastic as ever, and as

punctual at the required exercises; wrote his essay on the Pósthumous Power of the Pulpit, with which he closed the services of his class at their Anniversary, wrote his oration on the Dramatic Element in Pulpit Oratory, which he delivered on leaving the president's chair of the Porter Rhetorical Socie ty, decided one of the most important questions of his life, that of his immediate settlement in the ministry, composed four sermons, and preached so often and with so much zeal, that the end of the term found him again exhausted. But on the Sabbath after the exciting scenes of the Anniversary, he preached three times; on the succeeding Monday returned to his old study at Andover, wrote two sermons in six days, preached on the next Sabbath two sermons at Salem, two in Boston a week afterward, and during the ensuing month preached six times at Buffalo, N. Y., and once at Newark, N. J. He thus allowed himself but little repose from the commencement of his Senior year to the period of his ordination. How little he enjoyed after that period, the sequel will show.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL REGIMEN.

The life of Mr. Homer was as we have seen a happy one. It was exempt from many of the ills to which literary men are exposed. His memoir is not, like that of some others, a record of aches and groans. He went straight forward in one uninterrupted course of improvement until a fortnight before his death. No pecuniary want, no alarming disease, no domestic affliction ever compelled him to leave his studies for a single month. He performed his intellectual labors with as much facility as diligence. Labor ipse voluptas was his motto and the secret of his success. Never more happy than with his books, and having never learned from experience the ills or the perils of sickness, he was unwilling to adopt any severe regimen of body. If confidence in the soundness of

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one's constitution were a preventive of disease, his health would never have failed, for he used to say that he did not know enough about sickness to become a hypochondriac. He was abstemious in his diet, but he ate and drank what he chose. He was regular, as in everything else, so also in his exercise, but this exercise was regularly too little. In his most prudent days he was content with a morning and evening walk. The dumb-bells were too monotonous and unintellectual for him, the athletic games were too puerile, the wood-saw and the axe were better fitted to increase his selfdenial than his physical vigor; of horsemanship he was utterly ignorant, and indeed there was nothing which could allure him from his books, to those exercises which would have strengthened his muscular system. Even in childhood, he was a more successful competitor for a prize in the schoolroom, than for victory on the play-ground.

"Concourse and noise and toil he ever fled,

Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray
Of squabbling imps."

His friends often remonstrated with him on the perils of his
sedentary life. They endeavored to beguile him into a sys-
tem of more vigorous exercise, as the friends of Richard
Hooker would fain do with the judicious youth. "Richard,
I sent for you back," said the bishop of Salisbury, "to lend
you a horse which hath carried me many a mile, and, I thank
God, with much ease; and presently delivered into his hands
a walking-staff with which he professed he had traveled
through many parts of Germany." But a man must lose his
health twice before he will learn to take care of it. He
needs the "regret of folly to make him wise," and the pains
of disease to make him healthy. The subject of this memoir
had an instinctive abhorrence of ultraism in religion, politics
and literature; and he had seen so much of ultraism in die-
tetics, that he was repelled into an opposite fault.
"As to

this gastric juice," he said, "I know nothing about it, and care less. Nobody should think of it but the doctor. Animal food I eat, because I have read in the books that man is not a carniverous animal. All kinds of bread are nutritious to me, except what is called dyspeptic bread, and I am never injured by my food, save when I eat for the purpose of promoting my health. I am told that I must not exert my faculties immediately after dinner, but I never knew the day when I could not apply my mind in the afternoon as well as the morning. I am likewise told that the forenoon is better for study than the evening, but so far am I from finding any difference between them, that although I am not a Hibernian, I find the evening the best part of the day." When he read the words of Richard Baxter, "I had in my family the benefit of a godly, understanding, faithful servant, near sixty years old, who eased me of all care, and laid out all my money for housekeeping, so that I never had one hour's trouble about it, nor ever took one day's account of her for fourteen years together," he would say, "that is the way to live;" but it is not the way to live long. He who aims at an entire divorce from earthly cares that he may live a more intellectual life, should remember the paper kite's complaining of the string which held it to the earth and hindered its rise toward heaven.

In some respects, however, the habits of Mr. Homer were favorable to his health. He had the art of relieving a strained faculty by varying its exercise. It may be said of him, as of Robert Hall, "He found the advantages of passing from one subject to another at short intervals, generally of about two hours: thus casting off the mental fatigue that one subject had occasioned, by directing his attention to another, and thereby preserving the intellect in a state of elastic energy, from the beginning to the end of the time devoted daily to study." His innocence and cheerfulness of temper, his control over all his passions, helped to preserve a continued elasticity in his well-nigh spiritual body. His exercise also,