The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss Part 1

The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss.

by George L. Prentiss.

This memoir was undertaken at the request of many of Mrs. Prentiss' old and most trusted friends, who felt that the story of her life should be given to the public. Much of it is in the nature of an autobiography.

Her letters, which with extracts from her journals form the larger portion of its contents, begin when she was in her twentieth year, and continue almost to her last hour. They are full of details respecting herself, her home, her friends, and the books she wrote. A simple narrative, interspersed with personal reminiscences, and varied by a sketch of her father, and pa.s.sing notices of others, who exerted a moulding influence upon her character, completes the story. A picture is thus presented of the life she lived and its changing scenes, both on the natural and the spiritual side. While the work may fail to interest some readers, the hope is cherished that, like STEPPING HEAVENWARD, it will be welcomed into Christian homes and prove a blessing to many hearts; thus realising the desire expressed in one of her last letters: _Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls._

G. L. P.

KAUINFELS, September 11, 1882.

CHAPTER I.

THE CHILD AND THE GIRL.

1818-1839.

I. Birth-place and Ancestry. Seth Payson. Edward Payson. His Mother. A Sketch of his Life and Character. The Fervor of his Piety. Despondent Moods and their Cause. Bright, natural Traits. How he prayed and preached. Conversational Gift. Love to Christ. Triumphant Death.

Mrs. Prentiss was fortunate in the place of her birth. She first saw the light at Portland, Maine. Maine was then a district of Ma.s.sachusetts, and Portland was its chief town and seaport, distinguished for beauty of situation, enterprise, intelligence, social refinement and all the best qualities of New England character. Not a few of the early settlers had come from Cape Cod and other parts of the old Bay State, and the blood of the Pilgrim Fathers ran in their veins. Among its leading citizens at that time were such men as Stephen Longfellow, Simon Greenleaf, Prentiss Mellen, Samuel Fessenden, Ichabod Nichols, Edward Payson, and Asa c.u.mmings; men eminent for private and public virtue, and some of whom were destined to become still more widely known, by their own growing influence, or by the genius of their children.

But while favored in the place of her birth, Mrs. Prentiss was more highly favored still in her parentage. For more than half a century the name of her father has been a household word among the churches not of New England only, but throughout the land and even beyond the sea. It is among the most beloved and honored in the annals of American piety. [1]

He belonged to a very old Puritan stock, and to a family noted during two centuries for the number of ministers of the Gospel who have sprung from it. The first in the line of his ancestry in this country was Edward, who came over in the brig Hopewell, William Burdeck, Master, in 1635-6, and settled in the town of Roxbury. He was a native of Nasing, Ess.e.x Co., England. Among his fellow-pa.s.sengers in the Hopewell was Mary Eliot, then a young girl, sister of John Eliot, the ill.u.s.trious "Apostle to the Indians." Some years later she became his wife. Their youngest son, Samuel, was father of the Rev. Phillips Payson, who was born at Dorchester, Ma.s.sachusetts, 1705, and settled at Walpole, in the same State, in 1730. He had four sons in the ministry, all, like himself, graduates of Harvard College. The youngest of these, the Rev. Seth Payson, D.D., Mrs. Prentiss' grandfather, was born September 30, 1758, was ordained and settled at Rindge, New Hamps.h.i.+re, December 4, 1782, and died there, after a pastorate of thirty-seven years, February 26, 1820.

His wife was Grata Payson, of Pomfret, Conn. He was a man widely known in his day and of much weight in the community, not only in his own profession but in civil life, also, having several times filled the office of State senator. When in 1819 a plan was formed to remove Williams College to a more central location, and several towns competed for the honor, Dr. Payson was a.s.sociated with Chancellor Kent of New York, and Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. He is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and faithful minister of Christ. [2]

Edward, the eldest son of Seth and Grata Payson, was born at Rindge, July 25, 1783. His mother was noted for her piety, her womanly discretion, and her personal and mental graces. Edward was her first-born, and from his infancy to the last year of his life she lavished upon him her love and her prayers. The relation between them was very beautiful. His letters to her are models of filial devotion, and her letters to him are full of tenderness, good sense, and pious wisdom. He inherited some of her most striking traits, and through him they pa.s.sed on to his youngest daughter, who often said that she owed her pa.s.sion for the use of the pen and her fondness for rhyming to her grandmother Grata. [3]

Edward Payson was in all respects a highly-gifted man. His genius was as marked as his piety. There is a charm about his name and the story of his life, that is not likely soon to pa.s.s away. He belonged to a cla.s.s of men who seem to be chosen of Heaven to ill.u.s.trate the sublime possibilities of Christian attainment--men of seraphic fervor of devotion, and whose one overmastering pa.s.sion is to win souls for Christ and to become wholly like Him themselves. Into this goodly fellows.h.i.+p he was early initiated. There is something startling in the depth and intensity of his religious emotions, as recorded in his journal and letters. Nor is it to be denied that they are often marred by a very morbid element. Like David Brainerd, the missionary saint of New England, to whom in certain features of his character he bore no little resemblance, Edward Payson was of a melancholy temperament and subject, therefore, to sudden and sharp alternations of feeling. While he had great capacity for enjoyment, his capacity for suffering was equally great. Nor were these native traits suppressed, or always overruled, by his religious faith; on the contrary, they affected and modified his whole Christian life. In its earlier stages, he was apt to lay too much stress by far upon fugitive "frames," and to mistake mere weariness, torpor, and even diseased action of body or mind, for coldness toward his Saviour. And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now.

Many things were ascribed to Satanic influence which should have been ascribed rather to unstrung nerves and loss of sleep, or to a violation of the laws of health. [4] The disturbing influence of nervous and other bodily or mental disorders upon religious experience deserves a fuller discussion than it has yet received. It is a subject which both modern science and modern thought, if guided by Christian wisdom, might help greatly to elucidate.

The morbid and melancholy element, however, was only a painful incident of his character. It tinged his life with a vein of deep sadness and led to undue severity of self-discipline; but it did not seriously impair the strength and beauty of his Christian manhood. It rather served to bring them into fuller relief, and even to render more striking those bright natural traits--the sportive humor, the ready mother wit, the facetious pleasantry, the keen sense of the ridiculous, and the wondrous story-telling gift--which made him a most delightful companion to young and old, to the wise and the unlettered alike. It served, moreover, to impart peculiar tenderness to his pastoral intercourse, especially with members of his flock tried and tempted like as he was. He had learned how to counsel and comfort them by the things which he also had suffered. He may have been too exacting and harsh in dealing with himself; but in dealing with other souls nothing could exceed the gentleness, wisdom, and soothing influence of his ministrations.

As a preacher he was the impersonation of simple, earnest, and impa.s.sioned utterance. Although not an orator in the ordinary sense of the term, he touched the hearts of his hearers with a power beyond the reach of any oratory. Some of his printed sermons are models in their kind; that _e.g._ on "Sins estimated by the Light of Heaven," and that addressed to Seamen. His theology was a mild type of the old New England Calvinism, modified, on the one hand, by the influence of his favorite authors--such as Thomas a Kempis, and Fenelon, the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century, John Newton and Richard Cecil--and on the other, by his own profound experience and seraphic love. Of his theology, his preaching and his piety alike, Christ was the living centre. His expressions of personal love to the Saviour are surpa.s.sed by nothing in the writings of the old mystics. Here is a pa.s.sage from a letter to his mother, written while he was still a young pastor:

I have sometimes heard of spells and charms to excite love, and have wished for them, when a boy, that I might cause others to love me. But how much do I now wish for some charm which should lead men to love the Saviour!... Could I paint a true likeness of Him, methinks I should rejoice to hold it up to the view and admiration of all creation, and be hid behind it forever. It would be heaven enough to hear Him praised and adored. But I can not paint Him; I can not describe Him; I can not make others love Him; nay, I can not love Him a thousandth part so much as I ought myself. O, for an angel's tongue! O, for the tongues of ten thousand angels, to sound His praises.

He had a remarkable familiarity with the word of G.o.d and his mind seemed surcharged with its power. "You could not, in conversation, mention a pa.s.sage of Scripture to him but you found his soul in harmony with it--the most apt ill.u.s.trations would flow from his lips, the fire of devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only could he deliver a sermon from it, but that the ordinary time allotted to a sermon would be exhausted before he could pour out the fullness of meaning which a sentence from the word of G.o.d presented to his mind."

[5]

He was wonderfully gifted in prayer. Here all his intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual powers were fused into one and poured themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring affection. When he said, "Let us pray," a divine influence seemed to rest upon all present. His prayers were not mere pious mental exercises, they were devout inspirations.

No one can form an adequate conception of what Dr. Payson was from any of the productions of his pen. Admirable as his written sermons are, his extempore prayers and the gus.h.i.+ngs of his heart in familiar talk were altogether higher and more touching than anything he wrote. It was my custom to close my eyes when he began to pray, and it was always a letting down, a sort of rude fall, to open them again, when he had concluded, and find myself still on the earth. His prayers always took my spirit into the immediate presence of Christ, amid the glories of the spiritual world; and to look round again on this familiar and comparatively misty earth was almost painful. At every prayer I heard him offer, during the seven years in which he was my spiritual guide, I never ceased to feel new astonishment, at the wonderful variety and depth and richness and even novelty of feeling and expression which were poured forth. This was a feeling with which every hearer sympathised, and it is a fact well-known, that Christians trained under his influence were generally remarkable for their devotional habits. [6]

Dr. Payson possessed rare conversational powers and loved to wield them in the service of his Master. When in a genial mood--and the mild excitement of social intercourse generally put him in such a mood--his familiar talk was equally delightful and instructive. He was, in truth, an improvisatore. Quick perception, an almost intuitive insight into character, an inexhaustible fund of fresh, original thought and incident, the happiest ill.u.s.trations, and a memory that never faltered in recalling what he had once read or seen, easy self-control, and ardent sympathies, all conspired to give him this preeminence. Without effort or any appearance of incongruity he could in turn be grave and gay, playful and serious. This came of the utter sincerity and genuineness of his character. There was nothing artificial about him; nature and grace had full play and, so to say, constantly ran into each other. A keen observer, who knew him well, both in private and in public, testifies: "His facetiousness indeed was ever a near neighbor to his piety, if it was not a part of it; and his most cheerful conversations, so far from putting his mind out of tune for acts of religious wors.h.i.+p, seemed but a happy preparation for the exercise of devotional feelings." [7] This coexistence of serious with playful elements is often found in natures of unusual depth and richness, just as tragic and comic powers sometimes co-exist in a great poet.

The same qualities that rendered him such a master of conversation, lent a potent charm to his familiar religious talks in the prayer-meeting, at the fireside, or in the social circle. Always eager to speak for his Master, he knew how to do it with a wise skill and a tenderness of feeling that disarmed prejudice and sometimes won the most determined foe. Even in administering reproof or rebuke there was the happiest union of tact and gentleness. "What makes you blush so?" said a reckless fellow in the stage, to a plain country girl, who was receiving the mail-bag at a post office from the hand of the driver. "What makes you blush so, my dear?" "Perhaps," said Dr. Payson, who sat near him and was un.o.bserved till now, "Perhaps it is because some one spoke rudely to her when the stage was along here the last time."

Edward Payson was graduated at Harvard College in the cla.s.s of 1803.

In the autumn of that year he took charge of an academy then recently established in Portland. Resigning this position in 1806, he returned home and devoted himself to the study of divinity under his father's care. He was licensed to preach in May, 1807, and a few months later received a unanimous call to Portland, where he was ordained in December of the same year. On the 8th of May, 1811, he was married to Ann Louisa s.h.i.+pman, of New Haven, Conn. An extract from a manly letter to Miss s.h.i.+pman, written a few weeks after their engagement, will show the spirit which inspired him both as a lover and a husband:

When I wrote my first letter after my late visit, I felt almost angry with you and quite so with myself. And why angry with you? Because I began to fear you would prove a dangerous rival to my Lord and Master, and draw away my heart from His service. My Louisa, should this be the case, I should certainly hate you. I am Christ's; I must be Christ's; He has purchased me dearly, and I should hate the mother who bore me, if she proved even the _innocent_ occasion of drawing me from Him. I feared that you would do this. For a little time the conflict of my feelings was dreadful beyond description. For a few moments I wished I had never seen you. Had you been a right hand, or a right eye, had you been the life-blood in my veins (and you are dear to me as either) I must have given you up, had I continued to feel as I did. But blessed be G.o.d, He has shown me my weakness only to strengthen me. I now feel very differently. I still love you dearly as ever, but my love leads me _to_ Christ and not _from_ Him.

Dr. Payson received repeated invitations to important churches in Boston and New York, but declining them all, continued in the Portland pastorate until his death, which occurred October 22, 1827, in the forty-fifth year of his age. The closing months of his life were rendered memorable by an extraordinary triumph of Christian faith and patience, as well as of the power of mind over matter. His bodily suffering and agonies were indescribable, but, like one of the old martyrs in the midst of the flames, he seemed to forget them all in the greatness of his spiritual joy. In a letter written shortly after his death, Mrs. Payson gives a touching account of the tender and thoughtful concern for her happiness which marked his last illness. Knowing, for example, that she would be compelled to part with her house, he was anxious to have a smaller one purchased and occupied at once, so that his presence in it for a little while might make it seem more home-like to her and to her children after he was gone. "To tell you (she adds) what he was the last six memorable weeks would be altogether beyond my skill. All who beheld him called his countenance angelic." She then repeats some of his farewell words to her. Begging that, she would "not dwell upon his poor, shattered frame, but follow his blessed spirit to the realms of glory," he burst forth into an exultant song of delight, as if already he saw the King in His beauty! The well-known letter to his sister Eliza, dated a few weeks before his departure, breathes the same spirit. Here is an extract from it:

Were I to adopt the figurative language of Bunyan, I might date this letter from the land of Beulah, of which I have been for some weeks a happy inhabitant. The celestial city is full in my view. Its glories beam upon me, its breezes fan me, its odors are wafted to me, its sounds strike upon my ear, and its spirit is breathed into my heart. Nothing separates me from it but the river of death, which now appears but as an insignificant rill, that may be crossed at a single step, whenever G.o.d shall give permission. The Sun of Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float like an insect in the beams of the sun, exulting yet almost trembling while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why G.o.d should deign thus to s.h.i.+ne upon a sinful worm. A single heart and a single tongue seem altogether inadequate to my wants; I want a whole heart for every separate emotion, and a whole tongue to express that emotion. But why do I speak thus of myself and my feelings? why not speak only of our G.o.d and Redeemer? It is because I know not what to say--when I would speak of them my words are all swallowed up.

And thus, gazing already upon the Beatific Vision, he pa.s.sed on into glory. What is written concerning his Lord and Master might with almost literal truth have been inscribed over his grave: _The zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up._

II.

Birth and Childhood of Elizabeth Payson. Early Traits. Devotion to her Father. His Influence upon her. Letters to her Sister. Removal to New York. Reminiscences of the Payson Family.

Elizabeth Payson was born "about three o'clock"--so her father records it--on Tuesday afternoon, October 26, 1818. She was the fifth of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. All good influences seem to have encircled her natal hour. In a letter to his mother, dated October 27, Dr Payson enumerates six special mercies, by which the happy event had been crowned. One of them was the gratification of the mother's "wish for a daughter rather than a son." Another was G.o.d's goodness to him in sparing both the mother and the child in spite of his fear that he should lose them. This fear, strangely enough, was occasioned by the unusual religious peace and comfort which he had been enjoying. He had a presentiment that in this way G.o.d was forearming him for some extraordinary trial; and the loss of his wife seemed to him most likely to be that trial. "G.o.d has been so gracious to me in spiritual things, that I thought He was preparing me for Louisa's death. Indeed it may be so still, and if so His will be done. Let Him take all--and if He leaves us Himself we still have all and abound." The next day he writes:

Still G.o.d is kind to us. Louisa and the babe continue as well as we could desire. Truly, my cup runs over with blessings. I can still scarcely help thinking that G.o.d is preparing me for some severe trial; but if He will grant me His presence as He does now, no trial can seem severe. Oh, could I now drop the body, I would stand and cry to all eternity without being weary: G.o.d is holy, G.o.d is just, G.o.d is good; G.o.d is wise and faithful and true. Either of His perfections alone is sufficient to furnish matter for an eternal, unwearied song. Could I sing upon paper I should break forth into singing, for day and night I can do nothing but sing "Let the saints be joyful," etc., etc. But I must close. I can not send so much love and thankfulness to my parents as they deserve. My present happiness, all my happiness I ascribe under G.o.d to them and their prayers.

Surely, a home inspired and ruled by such a spirit was a sweet home to be born into!

The notices of Elizabeth's childhood depict her as a dark-eyed, delicate little creature, of sylph-like form, reserved and shy in the presence of strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies.

"Until I was three years old mother says I was a little angel," she once wrote to a friend. Her const.i.tution was feeble, and she inherited from her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "I never knew what it was to feel well," she wrote in 1840. Severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy. She had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick to catch its varying aspects of light and beauty, whether on land or sea. The s.h.i.+ps and wharves not far from her father's house, the observatory and fort on the hill overlooking Cas...o...b..y, the White Mountains far away in the distance, Deering's oaks, the rope-walk, and the ancient burying-ground--these and other familiar objects of "the dear old town," commemorated by Longfellow in his poem ent.i.tled "My Lost Youth," were indelibly fixed in her memory and followed her wherever she went, to the end of her days. In her movements she was light-footed, venturesome to rashness, and at times wild with fun and frolic. Her whole being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things painful stamped themselves upon it as with the point of a diamond.

Whatever she did, whatever she felt, she felt and did as for her life.

Allusion has been made to the intensity of her sympathies. The sight or tale of suffering would set her in a tremor of excitement; and in her eagerness to give relief she seemed ready for any sacrifice, however great. This trait arrested the observant eye of her father, and he expressed to Mrs. Payson his fear lest it might some day prove a real misfortune to the child. "She will be in danger of marrying a blind man, or a helpless cripple, out of pure sympathy," he once said.

But by far the strongest of all the impressions of her childhood related to her father. His presence was to her the happiest spot on earth, and any special expression of his affection would throw her into an ecstasy of delight. When he was away she pined for his return. "The children all send a great deal of love, and Elizabeth says, Do tell Papa to come home," wrote her mother to him, when she was six years old. Her recollections of her father were singularly vivid. She could describe minutely his domestic habits, how he looked and talked as he sat by the fireside or at the table, his delight in and skillful use of carpenters'

tools, his ingenious devices for amusing her and diverting his own weariness as he lay sick in bed, _e.g._, tearing up sheets of white paper into tiny bits, and then letting her pour them out of the window to "make believe it snowed," or counting all the bristles in a clothes-brush, and then as she came in from school, holding it up and bidding her guess their number--his coolness and efficiency in the wild excitements of a conflagration, the calm deliberation with which he walked past the horror-stricken lookers on and cut the rope by which a suicide was suspended; these and other incidents she would recall a third of a century after his death, as if she had just heard of or just witnessed them. To her child's imagination his memory seemed to be invested with the triple halo of father, hero, and saint. A little picture of him was always near her. She never mentioned his name without tender affection and reverence. Nor is this at all strange. She was almost nine years old when he died; and his influence, during these years, penetrated to her inmost being. She once said that of her father's virtues one only--punctuality--had descended to her. But here she was surely wrong. Not only did she owe to him some of the most striking peculiarities of her physical and mental const.i.tution, but her piety itself, if not inherited, was largely inspired and shaped by his.

In the whole tone and expression of her earlier religious life, at least, one sees him clearly reflected. His devotional habits, in particular, left upon her an indelible impression. Once, when four or five years old, rus.h.i.+ng by mistake into his room, she found him prostrate upon his face--completely lost in prayer. A short time before her death, speaking of this scene to a friend, she remarked that the remembrance of it had influenced her ever since. What somebody said of Sara Coleridge might indeed have been said with no less truth of Elizabeth Payson: "Her father had looked down into her eyes and left in them the light of his own."

The only records of her childhood from her own pen consist of the following letters, written to her sister, while the latter was pa.s.sing a year in Boston. She was then nine years old.

PORTLAND, _May 18, 1828._

My dear sister:--I thank you for writing to such a little girl as I am, when you have so little time. I was going to study a little catechism which Miss Martin has got, but she said I could not learn it. I want to learn it. I do not like to stay so long at school. We have to write composition by dictation, as Miss Martin calls it. She reads to us out of a book a sentence at a time. We write it and then we write it again on our slates, because we do not always get the whole; then we write it on a piece of paper. Miss Martin says I may say my Sunday-school [lesson] there. Mr. Mitch.e.l.l has had a great many new books. I have been sick. Doctor c.u.mmings has been here and says E. is better and he thinks he will not have a fever.... G. goes to school to Miss Libby, and H.

goes to Master Jackson. H. sends his love. Good-bye.

Your affectionate sister, E. PAYSON,

_September 29, 1828._

My dear sister:--I think you were very kind to write to me, when you have so little time. I began to go to Mrs. Petrie's school a week ago yesterday. I stay at home Mondays in the morning to a.s.sist in taking care of Charles or such little things as I can do. G. goes with me. When mother put Charles and him to bed, as soon as she had done praying with them, G. said, Mother, will this world be all burnt up when we are dead?

She said, Yes, my dear, it will. What, and all the dishes too? will they melt like lead? and will the ground be burnt up too? O what a nasty fire it will make. I saw the Northern lights last night. I sleep in a very large pleasant room in the bed with mother.... I have a very pleasant room for my baby-house over the porch which has two windows and a fireplace in it, and a little cupboard too. E. Wood and I are as intimate as ever. I suppose you know that Mr. Wood is building him a brick house. Mrs. Merril's little baby is dead. It was buried yesterday afternoon. Mr. Mussey lives across the street from us. He has a great many elm trees in his front yard. His house is three stories high and the trees reach to the top. We have heard two or three times from E.

since he went away. Yesterday all the Sabbath-schools walked in a procession and then went to our meeting-house and Mr. William Cutter addressed them.