MEMORIAL HENRY WARD BEECHER - 1887 - PREFACE - IT vouldb e impossible, even in a volunle ten tin esth is size, to do anything like justice to the remarkable qualities of Henry Ward Beecher. No one feels this more than the compiler, who for twenty years has been one of his most ardent admirers and a constant attendant hpon his pub lic ministrations. S acc does not permit much detail, and so only the more prominent scenes in h is life are portrayed, as a collection of paragraphs from his public utterances takes up the greater portion of the vork. It has been felt that these gems will, better than anything that could be written, illustrate his wide and original range of thought. The great man has gone, but while perusing these paragraphs the reader Inay again stand face to face with him and feel the influence of - his master mind. The love of humanity which was the controlling force of his life the originality of thought for which he was so widely known his touching pathos, his quaint and telling ing hun orh, is deep insight into human nati rc, and his almost universal knowledge, are each and all strikingly illustrated in the paragraphs selected. If ever it was true of man it is pre-eminently so of Henry Ward Beecher, that He being dead yet s1 eakcth. HENRY WARD BEECHER. Hts Tather. EVER was there a better illustration N of the power of hereditary tendencies than that furnished by Henry Ward Beecher. In his well known eccentricities he was a feeble reproduction. of his venerable father, who for mork than half a century, kept himself and his denomination in hot water by deeds and utterances quite as sensational and bewildering as any recorded of his illustrious son. Fifty years ago Lyman Beecher ranked among the first of living pulpit orators, and in his own country was without a rival. He was of all men most fervid in illustration, nlost fertile in graphic delineation, most effective in utterance. Though the last years of his life were spent in Brookl n, in which city he died twenty years ago, and though he attained to his chief distinction and career of usefulness in Ohio, it was in New England that he was born and reared and that he reached his first national fame. His ancestors S were anlong the earliest people who settled in New England. He could trace his line directly back to a widow, Hannah Beecher, who settled in New Haven in 1638, eighteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims. He was a graduate of Yale College, and he acquired in that institution an unusual reputation for fine speaking. Beyond the section of New England in which he preached his fame at the start spread slowly, and it was not until 1804, when he was nearly thirty years of age, that an opportunity came for hi111 to be heard by the public at large. In that year he preached a sermon on the death of Alexander Hamilton which drew to hinl the eyes of half the Nation. It was a truly great sermon for so a man, and when some years later he gave his heart and genius to the temperance cause six of the sermons that he preached touched the high-water marks of his unrivaled eloquence. , Many anecdotes are on record of Lyman Beechers eccentricities. He was a proverbially absent-minded man, and when he had finished preaching the excitement to which his systenl had been wrought required to be reduced in peculiar ways. He was accustonled at times to let himself down by playing Auld Lang Syne on the violin and by vigorous dancing in the parlor when he reached home. He was three times married, and becaine the father of thirteen children, eleven of whom in 1872 were still living. G His Mothcr... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.