turn, his tones of voice were mournful, and he seemed to have lost a brother. While a student at Andover, he writes, Aug. 3, 1838, "Yesterday one of our number, Mr. Homer Taylor, died of typhus fever. He had been sick only a fortnight, and was not supposed to be dangerously ill until a day or two previous to his death. There were some peculiarly interesting circumstances connected with his departure. His delirium, brought on by the violence of his disease, was almost wholly religious. The fact seemed to furnish as cheering evidence, as in such circumstances, could be afforded, of the holiness of his previous life. It seemed as if the power that disordered his mind could not expel, but only confused, those pious contemplations on which he loved to dwell.”—“We buried him at evening. 'Thou art gone to the grave, but we will not deplore thee,' that beautiful hymn by Bishop Heber, was sung at the grave, and the solemn toll of the bell mingled most richly with the tones of the music. As we turned away from the grave-yard, the sinking sun repeated the lesson of admonition. It seemed like the voice of providence and the voice of nature speaking together." Eleven of Mr. Homer's collegiate classmates died before him, and not one of them dropped into his grave without calling forth some lamentation from the subject of this memoir. "One by one," he says, we shall all drop away, till the last survivor looks back on the catalogue of the dead. Who will that last survivor be?" "O what are our prospects of worldly honor or happiness, compared with those that brighten the fading vision, and cheer the sinking spirit." It is not pretended that in Mr. Homer's intercourse with his friends he was one of those marvellous proper men, who never say anything which is not fit for the press, or write a private letter which is not prepared for the public eye. He did not talk like a book, nor compose his epistles as he composed notes on Aeschines. He agreed with Hazlitt, that “to expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous, and even if he did so, you would find fault with him as a pedant. We should read authors, and not converse with them." Those who enjoyed his correspondence, which was voluminous for one of his years, value his letters highly, but will not allow many of them to be published, they are so full of private allusions, of out-flowings from his own free nature. They are such as none but a friend could write to a friend, and the greater portion of them would lose their interest on the printed page, as the dew-drop parts with its brilliancy when taken up by the chemist for an analysis. What we wish in a friendly correspondence is, that the letter be an emanation of the friend who writes it, that it be himself drawn out, not with any desire of making a show, for this is not friendly, not with any very prominent desire of giving instruction, for this is the correspondence of a lecturer, or of a professor, or of a student, rather than of a man; but with the desire of communing heart with heart, and transfusing one's own familiar thoughts or feelings into the soul of another who is absent in body but present in sympathy. There are some who can engage in an agreeable kind of letter-writing which tends more immediately and avowedly to intellectual edification, but this is the colloquy of judgment with judgment, and has no peculiar relation to the communings of friend with friend. The subject of this memoir was a true and hearty friend, and all his scholarship never left him a dried up specimen of humanity. But it must not be imagined that his friendship was unprofitable either to himself or to others. The nature of it may be learned from the following description which he has given of onel to whom he had been attached from early childhood, and with whom he had shared the most hidden joys of his life. "I think," he says, "that Mr. Brown was made for my friend, and that I was made for his; for his 1 1 Mr. James G. Brown, formerly of Boston, Mass. faults were those which I have not, and mine are those which he had not. There is a depression in my character where his had a protuberance, and there is a fulness with myself which corresponded with a deficiency in him, so that we met exactly and sympathized in all points."—"I may safely say," he writes again," that of the whole circle of my acquaintance, although there was not one who would better adorn and enliven by his social qualities a circle of pleasure, there was not one who possessed a deeper spirit of piety, or lived nearer to his Saviour. I am surrounded by mementos of his religious worth, always valued, but since his death most precious. His letters to me breathed the spirit of a man in whose soul religion was the chief treasure. His voice, the tones of which were so familiar in this room, that I hear them this moment, and have heard them again and again since his departure, I remember chiefly for its eloquence in private prayer, and on the great subject which so often made his eye kindle and his heart overflow. I need not assure you how wide is the vacancy which his loss has left in my heart. Differences of education and temperament and circumstances had only deepened our long attachment. There never has been a time since our first acquaintance, when my interest in him has not led me to anticipate how severe would be the shock of his death. Even now, although the first anguish of grief is over, there are, and there must be for a long time to come, hours when its bitterness will recur afresh to the spirit. Yet God's holy will be done.” MR. HOMER IN AFFLICTION. The last of the preceding paragraph suggests a theme for the present. Though the life of our friend was one of sunshine, still there were a few dark clouds which cast their shadow over his feelings and prospects. It is well that he did not go through this vale of tears, without leaving some illustrations of his fitness to endure the ills, as well as enjoy the pleasures of the world. His manly grief, his calm submission to the will of heaven, and the felicitous mode in which he ministered consolation to his afflicted friends, will be seen in the following extracts from his correspondence: “Andover, Theological Seminary, January 20, and February 27, 1840. The friend of my early days has been torn from me. You know how deep and long continued has been my attachment to Mr. James G. Brown. My love for him had been growing deeper and deeper every year, until it had sent its roots into the very depths of my soul. For the last few years he had been engaged in commerce at New Orleans, but wishing to gratify the desires, and appease the anxieties of the many who loved him, he had relinquished his business in that city, and was preparing for a permanent residence among his friends at the north. Just before embarking from New Orleans, he wrote as follows: 'I feel a delight in thinking there is One into whose hands I can commit my spirit, and who can command the winds and waves to bear me in safety to my destined port. But if the sea is to prove my grave and burial-place, I pray God that I may be fully prepared for whatever he is to call me to pass through. Infinite wisdom is on the throne, and that which is done is sure to be right.' There were some peculiar reasons which made me desirous of seeing him at this time. Never before had I anticipated such pleasure in meeting him, and never before had I looked for his return with such anxiety. For the first time in my life, I examined the ship news every day, from his embarkation at New Orleans to his arrival at New York. The recent disasters on the coast had made me apprehensive of peril for him on his homeward voyage, and I read each paper till I saw with joy the record of his safe return. But he had a perilous passage, and it is almost by a miracle that he escaped the disasters of the sea. Where we least looked for danger, where we all felt as se- cure as by our own firesides, at the threshold of his home, he met the death from which he had been saved in the hour of previous danger.1 On the afternoon of the thirteenth of January, he left New York for Boston in the steamer Lexington. Amid the flames which consumed that ill-fated boat, or amid the cold waters that swallowed up so many of our fellow citizens on that dark night, he perished. His friends feel assured that he died valiantly and sweetly, and resigned himself This incident probably suggested the illustration to be found on p. 214. with christian composure to the will of his Lord. A few days after the conflagration, his trunk was found upon the beach. It had been exposed to piratical rapacity, but the rude hands of the robbers had left what was more precious than all which they took, his pocket Bible and his Daily Food. It was soothing to find that he had recently marked for his perusal the twenty-third Psalm, which embraces the significant verses, 'The Lord is my shepherd,' and 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.' In his Daily Food he had turned the leaf at the following passages which had been selected for this last day of his life, and which, from his known habits, we believe he had been pondering during his few last hours: He that endureth to the end shall be saved,' and 'Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.' I have requested Mrs. Sigourney to commemorate these and other incidents in a poetical effusion. The following are her stanzas, and there is a charming simplicity and a quiet piety about them, which place them far above everything which has yet been written in reference to that sad disaster. 6 On the death of JAMES GRISWOLD BROWN, who perished on board the Lexington, January 13, 1840. 'Watch,'-saith the Saviour,- watch,' Was this thy theme Of holy meditation,-thou whose heart Buoyant with youth and health and dreams of bliss, While each rejoicing thought Say, didst thou watch? The sullen, wreck-strewn beach Makes answer that thou didst. Yea, the deep sea So pitiless and stern,-who took the dead |