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It is a great thing to have lost such a man.
It is much greater to have had such a man to lose.
He was the child of the people :
He was the type of the people.
From Mr. Robinson' s Eulogy on General Grant.
I would the great world grew like thee,
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and charity.
Tennyson.
Heart-affluence in discursive talk
From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye
That saw through all the Muses' walk ;
Seraphic intellect and force
To seize and throw the doubts of man ;
Impassioned logic, which outran
The hearer in its fiery course ;
And manhood fused with female grace
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unasked, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face ;
All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have looked on : if they looked in vain,
My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.
Tennyson.
The Hartford Times of Wednesday, February 14, 1900, con-
tained the following announcement :
The Hon. Henry C. Robinson died at his home, No. 420
Main street, at a quarter before six o'clock this morning. All
the members of his family were present at the final hour, and
his death occurred in the midst of the group that held the ten-
derest and most affectionate of places in his heart.
In the same edition of the Hartford Times which an-
nounced his decease, the following editorial article ap-
peared :
A genial and kindly presence was ex-Mayor Henry C. Rob-
inson's, whose death occurred this morning. The full account
of his useful and honorable life will be read with interest tinged
with sadness, for his death will be felt to be a real loss to the
community which he loved and helped. It seems hard to real-
ize that his pleasant greeting on the street will be heard no
more.
Mr. Robinson had the gift of conciliating personal friend-
ship, and the ability to impress respect for his ability on all
who came in contact with him. The important part he played
in Connecticut affairs is of itself abundant proof of this, for it
began early in his life, and it continued to the end. In law he
was accustomed to take the broader view of a case, and his ar-
guments were constantly marked by this quality, whether at
the bar or before a legislative committee. His ability was mul-
tiform. As a lawyer he stood very high, but as counsel for the
New York, New Haven & Hartford road he was as valuable
as an adviser in business affairs as for his opinion on any legal
point, or on the conduct of a case at law. He was almost as
well known as a writer and speaker in two or three other de-
partments as for his legal and political addresses, and in his
Bible class in the South church he was always listened to with
interest, and almost always gave his hearers something that
struck them forcibly and lingered in their memories.
He was a man much loved by his family and friends, and
when this is true it speaks volumes for the kindliness and lova-
bleness of a man. He was cheerful and hopeful, and in all
these ways he confirmed his claim to regard, and set a whole-
some example to others.
The graves grow thicker, and life's ways more bare,
As years on years go by ;
Nay, thou hast more green gardens in thy care
And more stars in thy sky.
The Hartford Courant of Thursday, February 15th, con-
tained a variety of articles concerning Mr. Robinson, which,
by permission, are here reprinted ; and first, the following
sketch of his personal history and public relations :
Henry Cornelius Robinson, LL.D., was born in this city
August 28, 1832. He was a younger son of David Franklin
Robinson and Anne Seymour Robinson, and through them was
descended from the first Puritan settlers of New England. He
traced his ancestry on the paternal side to Thomas Robinson,
who was, probably, a kinsman of the Rev. John Robinson, the
pastor of the Mayflower pilgrims, and who came from England
among the earlier arrivals and settled at Guilford, in 1667.
His mother, who was a daughter of Elizabeth Denison, wife of
Asa Seymour of this city, was a descendant in a direct line from
Elder William Brewster, who was born in Nottinghamshire,
England, and was one of the leaders of those who came over in
the Mayflower, and the ruling elder of Plymouth colony.
Mr. Robinson was educated at the Hartford Grammar
School and at the Hartford Public High School after its con-
solidation with the Grammar School. He was graduated from
the latter in the class of 1849, and immediately entered Yale
College, from which he was graduated with high honors in the
"famous class of 1853." Among the members of this class,
which was one of much distinction, were the Hon. Andrew D.
White, ex-president of Cornell University and ambassador to
Germany, Bishop Davies of Michigan, Dr. Charlton T. Lewis
and Dr. James M. Whiton of New York, the late Isaac H.
Bromley, George W. Smalley, Washington correspondent of
the London Times, for many years the London correspondent of
6
the New York Tribune, United States Senator R. L. Gibson,
the Hon. B. K. Phelps, E. C. Stedman of New York, the poet,
the late S. M. Capron, Julius Catlin, General Edward Harland
of Norwich, Dr. William M. Hudson, Wayne MacVeagh, the
late Judge Edward W. Seymour of the Supreme Court, Judge
Shiras of the United States Supreme Court, Dr. Henry P.
Stearns, the late George H. Watrous, formerly president of the
" Consolidated " road, and a number of others who have attained
distinction in law, medicine, politics, and the arts and sciences.
After graduation, Mr. Robinson studied law in the office of
his elder brother, Lucius F. Robinson, and after three years of
practice by himself became a partner of his brother. This
partnership was severed by the death of the elder brother in
1861, and Mr. Robinson continued in business alone until 18S8,
when his eldest son, Lucius F. Robinson, became a member of
the firm. Recently, John T. Robinson, the youngest son, was
admitted to the firm, the style of which is Robinson & Robin-
son. The firm is easily one of the most prominent in the Con-
necticut bar and is widely known throughout this section of
the country. The firm has charge of a great many corporation
interests, besides Mr. Robinson's well-known connection as one
of the leading counsel of the "Consolidated" road of which he
was for many years a leading director and a member of the
standing committee.
Mr. Robinson all through his life was a disciple of Izaak
Walton, and delighted especially in trout fishing, taking fre-
quently days of relaxation from the duties of his profession
during the season. He was, also, in his earlier days fond of
hunting and gained a large knowledge of the surrounding
country in his trips, thus developing his innate love for the
beautiful in nature. Early in his professional career he became
interested in the science of pisciculture, considering it from its
important bearing on the food supply. In 1866, General Haw-
ley, then governor of the state, appointed Mr. Robinson a fish
commissioner. He accepted the appointment and at once
bent his efforts towards the development of the fish industry
in the state. He advanced fish culture by legislative enact-
ments preventing pound-fishing in the Connecticut River, and
by experiments in hatching. Wise legislation in this direction
was repealed before it had become fully operative, owing to
adverse influences of a partisan character. The first artificial
hatching of shad was made under Mr. Robinson's direction as
fish commissioner, associated with the late F. W. Russell of
this city. Mr. Robinson's methods and theories had the full
approval of the late eminent naturalist, Professor Agassiz, who
was deeply interested in the experiments and the legislation on
the subject.
Mr. Robinson was elected mayor of his native city in 1872,
overcoming a large democratic majority by the personal popu-
larity he enjoyed and the confidence felt in him by the commu-
nity generally. He served one term and gave the city an
administration notable for efficiency. Municipal affairs were
conducted on business principles and there was an economical
administration of affairs. During his administration, Hartford
became the sole capital of the state, in which movement Mr.
Robinson took a large part. He was the instigating force in
the establishment of several of the city commissions. In 1879
Mr. Robinson was elected a member of the General Assembly,
having for his colleague General Lucius A. Barbour. His prom-
inence in public affairs and his legal knowledge and brilliant
eloquence made him chairman of the judiciary committee and
leader of the House. He was successful in procuring the
enactment of several important matters of legislation which
included the change in legal procedure. Always a republican
in politics from the formation of the party, Mr. Robinson con-
tinued to support its principles all through life, and his influ-
ence in party politics was always felt. He received the repub-
lican nomination for governor three times, in the spring of
1876, the fall of the same year, and again in 187S at the cele-
brated convention in Allyn Hall, when he declined and Gov-
ernor Andrews was nominated and was subsequently elected by
the General Assembly, the greenback defection from the dem-
ocratic party throwing the election into the Legislature. Each
nomination Mr. Robinson received was by acclamation. He
was a member of the national republican convention at Chi-
cago in 1880 as one of the delegates from this state, which
nominated Garfield and Arthur, and he drafted a large portion
of the platform which was finally adopted.
Mr. Robinson's large law practice prevented him from
accepting many appointments which were tendered him. He
was counsel for many leading corporations in the state, and in the
the contest for the governorship growing out of the dead-lock
8
of 1 89 1-3, and the quo warranto proceedings which followed,
was the senior counsel for the republican party. Mr. Robinson,
besides his position as a leading director of the New York, New
Haven & Hartford Railroad Company, was a director of the
Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Connecticut
Fire Insurance Company, the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection
and Insurance Company, a trustee of the Connecticut Trust &
Safe Deposit Company, a member of the Hartford Board of
Trade, and was for several years president of the Republican
Club of Hartford. Mr. Robinson was also a charter member
and president of the City Missionary Society for several years,
president of the Henry C. Robinson Troop, a campaign organi-
zation, a director of the Hartford Hospital, American trustee
for the Scottish Union Insurance Company, trustee of the
Wadsworth Atheneum, and an original member of the Monday
Evening (Literary) Club.
Mr. Robinson had been for over fifty years a member of
the South Church and one of Dr. Parker's warmest friends.
He was always very influential in church matters and had been
a member of the church and the society committees, besides
being for several years superintendent of the Sunday-school.
Mr. Robinson's well-known sympathy with philanthropic,
charitable, religious, and educational movements led to his
active participation with many enterprises of that character,
his counsel being frequently sought in matters of that kind, as
that which could be implicitly relied upon. For many years he
served on committees, boards of directors, and ecclesiastical
associations throughout the state, doing a large amount of work
in these lines. He was a member of the Hartford Tract Society,
a trustee of the Wadsworth Atheneum of this city, a trustee of
the Hartford Grammar school, vice-president of the Bar Asso-
ciation of Connecticut and of that of Hartford county, the third
president of the Yale Alumni Association of this city, following
Judge Shipman and Mr. Twichell, and was one of the founders
of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revo-
lution, his title in the latter being gained from the service of
his great-grandfather, Colonel Timothy Robinson, who served
in the Revolutionary War.
Mr. Robinson's pre-eminent position in the practice of the
law was gained by great natural gifts of oratory, diligent study,
and much arduous toil and a large practice of much variety.
He had professional attainments of a high degree of scholarship
added to which was high personal character. Few excelled
him in brilliant eloquence, and his efforts in that line have been
marked by a broad grasp of his subject and a full and sincere
patriotism. His great gifts in this direction found expression
in many addresses breathing patriotism, loyalty, and devotion to
the broad interests of humanity and the interests of his country
and his native city. Among his most prominent addresses,
some of which commanded the attention of thousands at the
time, were his oration at the dedication of the Putnam eques-
trian statue at Brooklyn, Conn.; the Hartford services at the
deaths of President Garfield and General Grant ; the semi-
centennial of the Hartford Public High School ; the nomi-
nating speech for Colonel Frank W. Cheney in the republican
state convention in Foot Guard Armory ; the address at the
first banquet of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the
American Revolution at the Allyn House, where he presided ;
and the address at the celebration of the 400th anniversary of
the birth of Martin Luther, at the Park Church. Especially
interesting as models of eloquent oratory, fine diction, and fer-
vent patriotism, were his many addresses on Memorial Day
before members of the Grand Army of the Republic. He was
also the orator at the dedication of the Putnam statue on Bush-
nell Park, and at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of
the General Assembly.
Mr. Robinson was for many years lecturer at Yale on the
ethics of the legal profession. He has written extensively for
magazines, principally for the New Englander and the Yale Law
Journal. The most ambitious of his more recent writings was
the "Constitutional History of Connecticut," lately published
in " Hurd's New England States." The public bath-house,
which has proved of so much benefit, was one of Mr. Robin-
son's ideas which found expression in his message as mayor,
and was established during his administration. He was also
an earnest advocate of a public market for this city. Mr. Rob-
inson was tendered the appointment of minister to Spain by
President Harrison, which he declined, and was also tendered
the presidency of the " Consolidated " road several years ago.
Mr. Robinson was married August 28, 1862, on his thirtieth
birthday, to Miss Eliza Niles Trumbull, daughter of John F.
Trumbull of Stonington. Mrs. Robinson and five children sur-
vive him. The children are Lucius F. Robinson and John T.
Robinson, law partners of their father, Henry S. Robinson, sec-
retary of the Connecticut Trust & Safe Deposit Company,
Lucy T., the wife of Sidney T. Miller of Detroit, and Miss Mary
S. Robinson of this city. Mr. Robinson also leaves four grand-
children, who are, Elizabeth Trumbull and Sidney Trowbridge
Miller, children of Mrs. Miller, and Lucius Franklin and Bar-
clay Robinson, children of Lucius F. Robinson. Two sisters
survive Mr. Robinson, Mrs. Sarah A. Trumbull, widow of Dr.
J. Hammond Trumbull, and Mrs. Shipman, the wife of Judge
Nathaniel Shipman.
Mr. Robinson's office has always been a school for lawyers,
some of whom have attained eminence in the bar and in other
pursuits. Among those who studied law in Mr. Robinson's
office are the following : Sylvester C. Dunham, vice-president
of the Travelers Insurance Company, Judge W. F. Henney,
James A. Barnes of New Bedford, Mass., Henry C. Gussman of
New Britain, Daniel J. Griffin, now dead, George P. McLean
and Austin Brainard, members of the firm of Sperry, McLean
& Brainard, Andrew F. Gates, T. Dwight Merwin of New
York, and a son of the Hon. Henry Barnard, now dead.
The Courant, in an editorial article, also said :
The death of Hon. Henry C. Robinson brings a sense of
loss, not only to this community, but to the whole State. His
was a unique figure in our Connecticut life ; the place he occu-
pied was all his own. As an orator, he stood foremost in the
State ; as a politician, he was a leading republican from the
early days of that party ; as a lawyer, he was at the head of the
profession ; as a citizen, he was full of patriotic impulse and
public spirit ; and, as a friend, he was sympathetic, cordial, and
demonstrative in a way that bound others to him by a peculiar
affection.
In the widespread grief that followed the first announce-
ments of his critical illness, there were, of course, many allu-
sions to the large outside successes of his life. But always the
uppermost thought was of the man's great heart, of his kind
and affectionate disposition, of the wide range and the wit and
brilliancy of his conversation, of the charm of his sympathetic
companionship — of the greatest of all his successes, his hold
upon the hearts of those who were admitted to the privilege of
his abundant friendship. His encouraging way with young
men has especially endeared him to many, now no longer
young, who remember with gratitude his helpful friendliness
in the days of their early struggles.
One of the most noticeable elements of Mr. Robinson's na-
ture was his great enthusiasm. He was of an emotional tem-
perament and easily moved, sometimes even to tears, by a ten-
der strain of music or a burst of eloquence. His feeling was
intense, and in his large and many sympathies he was always
abounding in enthusiasm, whether for friends, for books, for
music, or for art. He was a genuine and devoted lover of na-
ture, with the spirit of the true poet in him. He was fond of
outdoor life, and, so long as he had the strength, was a devoted
fisherman and hunter. No one knew better than he the brooks
and fields of this county, or the delight of communion with
them. A few years ago he fell down the steps that lead to his
office, and the injuries then incurred incapacitated him for out-
door exercise and undoubtedly in that way shortened his life.
He was one of the founders and most enthusiastic members
of the Monday Evening Club of this city, and his essays there
were of a choice literary quality and were often enjoyed later
by the public as Kent Club lectures, and at other occasions.
Of his lovely home life it is not for a newspaper to speak,
but none who enjoyed his hospitality need be reminded of the
pleasure it gave them, or the sweetness of the atmosphere
which pervaded the household as it was revealed to them. Mr.
Robinson, in his more than sixty years of life here, had come
to be an essential part of Hartford. He will be missed in many
ways, and mourned by very many outside the immediate circle
of his intimate friends.
The following tributes from some of Mr. Robinson's per-
sonal friends are taken also from the Courant of February
1 5th : —
from Ris pastor, Dr. Parker.
To the Editor of the Courant :
In the great sorrow, and in the shock and confusion of
thought and feeling caused by the death of my dear friend and
brother, how can I write what I would and should, concerning
him ?
Love sees him through a mist of tears,
Transfigured in a new, strange light,
Wherein each virtue shines so bright,
That every frailty disappears.
For more than forty years we have walked together in an
uninterrupted companionship of mutual confidence and affec-
tion. I have looked to him, and never in vain. I have leaned
upon him, nor ever found him wanting or weak. I have de-
rived wisdom, strength, comfort, and courage from him at
every stage of the long way. We have taken sweet counsel to-
gether. No man ever had a more loyal, steadfast, and faithful
friend than he has been to me.
And he has gone !
This complaint of personal feeling might be unsuitable for
publication, but for the fact that it probably voices the feeling
of many others in this community and elsewhere. Mr. Robin-
son had a host of friends, in all classes and conditions, for he
showed himself friendly and made and kept friends.
There is but one feeling concerning him in this community
— the feeling of bereavement. It is literally true that "the
mourners go about the streets." Hartford mourns not only
the loss of a distinguished citizen of whom she was justly
proud, but of a good man of whom she was justly fond. No
one of her sons loved her more or served her more devotedly
and efficiently. No one of them was more intimately associ-
ated with her best traditions and interests. No one of them
was a truer or more typical representative of her social, civic,
and religious life. He seemed builded, as a living stone, into
the very structure of her commonwealth. Universally and al-
most familiarly known, he was universally respected, honored,
admired, and beloved. Omitting all consideration of his strictly
professional qualifications, services, and successes, of which his
legal brethren may more suitably testify, we recall the diver-
sity of intellectual gifts which he possessed, and his culture and
employment of the same, by which he achieved singular dis-
tinction, and rendered highly important service in the elucida-
tion of public questions and concerns. His naturally vigorous
and fertile mind was subjected to the discipline of hard study
and close thought. A wide range of good reading in all depart-
ments of literature enriched him with the materials of apt illus-
tration for his own discourse. He had imagination, and the
13
vision of it, and the poetic temperament. He had the logical
faculty, and reasoned cogently, though not in supreme respect
of logical terms and forms. His command of language was re-
markable, and his use of it, in writing or speaking, was alike
forcible and felicitous.
He seldom spoke without careful preparation, although the
ease and grace of his speech seemed spontaneous and unpre-
meditated. The rhetorical efflorescence of earlier years proved
to be only the condition and harbinger of that fruitfulness, both
of thought and expression, which characterized the public utter-
ances of his riper age.
We had come to regard him as our "chief speaker," the one
to be brought forward on important public occasions. He was
capable of eloquence. He had the oratorical art and power.
Since Richard D. Hubbard died, no man among us surpassed
him in these respects.
Mr. Robinson had in his nature an interesting commixture
of conservative and progressive elements. He liked and clung
to old ways, old forms, old customs, old traditions, yet not with-
standing reasonable innovations. But no one was more hospi-
table to new ideas, to new interpretations of truth, to new light
from any quarter.
He welcomed the investigations of sober scholars. He
would not muzzle criticism. He was not afraid of new depart-
ures in theology, but would bid them depart in peace. His
Christian sympathies were catholic because his human-hearted-
ness was so large and warm.
Mr. Robinson was radically and unalterably democratic in
principle and spirit. He believed in men, in the common peo-
ple. He trusted them, and had no respect for aristocracy in
Church or State. I have never known a man who had more
faith in his fellowmen, and this, conjoined with a faith in God,
made him an optimist. I have never known a man who ex-
ceeded him in respect of charity towards men. Those clear,
keen eyes of his searched out and saw through shams and in-
sincerities and lies, and made them blench. But those same
eyes were ever detecting the better things in weak and erring
mortals. His excuses and apologies for human faults and frail-
ties were often as ingenious as they always were ingenuous.
Out of the loving-kindness of his heart, he was a strength to
the poor and to the needy in their distress. The thing he most
14
hated was inhumanity. Mr. Robinson had a practical Christian
philosophy of human life as related both to nature and to God,
as conditioned by infirmity and mortality and yet embraced in
some good purpose of Divine Love, which enabled him to en-
counter and sustain great trials and sorrows with singular for-
titude and serenity of mind.
He was splendidly courageous and hopeful. This, with his
loyalty, made him a most helpful friend.
He bore up and fared on so heartily, so cheerily, so
bravely ! Weakness found strength, discouragement found
courage in his presence and counsel. Somehow he contrived
to turn the edge of complaints, and to divert the currents of
despondency, and to set one in a higher and brighter and bet-
ter course of thought and feeling. Minor music was not to his
taste. Mr. Despondency was not his type of a Christian.
He had a good, sound judgment, a rich and saving common
sense, underneath all the more brilliant gifts which delighted
men's eyes. He was a great believer in human freedom, — in
freedom of thought and speech and action. Within the sphere
of his liberty as a conscientious and Christian man, he moved
freely as he would, and thought others should do likewise, with-
out overmuch regard to criticism. It was of great importance
to him that people should diligently and religiously mind their
own business. Virtue by repression and compulsion seemed
impracticable to his mind.
Mr. Robinson was a very high-minded, as well as a strong-
minded man ; a great and pure-hearted man ; a just, kind, gen-
erous, affectionate man ; and, I may add, a profoundly religious
man. He worked no ill, spoke no ill, thought no ill of his neigh-
bor. He had less reason than most of us to pray for deliver-
ance from "all uncharitableness." He was a bright and shin-
ing light in this city. He was a tower of strength in the church
of God here.
It was pathetic to see this man who, only a few years since,
rejoiced in almost perfect health of body, and exulted in ath-
letic recreations by stream or wood or shore, cast down in griev-
ous physical disabilities and pains, but it was beautiful to see
his patient acceptance of his lot, and his fine exemplification of
his own philosophy.
A friend who visited him one day said to me, speaking of
his protracted and severe sufferings, " He bears them like an
early Christian ! "
15
Another man, of humble occupation, spoke the truth, who
said to me but yesterday, " I suppose there was no man in Hart-
ford so well known, and who will be so much missed by every-
body, as Mr. Robinson." On the whole, what a fortunate, suc-
cessful, happy, useful, and honorable life his has been ! God
be thanked for it. But what shall we do without him ?
E. P. P.
from president Greene of the Connecticut Mutual*
To the Editor of the Courant :
For thirty years I have had a double relation with Mr. Rob-
inson. He has been my business associate and my friend. In
both relations he had a distinctive and characteristic value.
As a director in the corporation of which we were mem-
bers, and in which he was for many years the senior director,
he took an enthusiastic interest in both the scientific and the
practical side of its problems and affairs. His acute and clear
intelligence, his zeal, his tact, his courage, his experience, his
wide knowledge of men and of affairs of moment, as well as his
great professional acquirements, made him a counselor of unu-
sual value. Like every man of power, he made his own place,
which another may never wholly take. The sense of his loss
will never pass from the minds of those who were associated
with him.
But who can describe his friend : the man who brought to
every day's intercourse the cheerful face, the hearty voice, the
personal interest, the intelligent sympathy, the helpful consid-
eration, and the high spirit, that made an atmosphere of hope
and strength wherever he moved. No picture of the man can
be made by a recitation of the powers of his brilliant mind, his
wit, the charm of his cultivated gifts of imagination and expres-
sion. It was their summation and blending in his personality,
and made vital with his broad human sympathy and his strong,
warm, sunny nature, that made the man who won the personal
affection of all who touched him, and whose memory will re-
main to every such a distinct and precious possession.
Jacob L. Greene.
from ex-President Dwigbt of ^ale.
To the Editor of the Courant :
May I ask the privilege of saying a few words in your
16
columns in testimony of my high esteem and warm friendship
for the Hon. Henry C. Robinson, the tidings of whose death
will bring sorrow to a very wide circle of friends who respected
and loved him. My first meeting with him was at a time when
I was called into the service of our college as a teacher for a
short period, about four months after my graduation in 1849,
and in the early part of his freshman year. In common with
his classmates he opened his heart kindly towards me in those
days of our first acquaintance, and, as a consequence, the
friendship of a life-time was begun. The class of 1853 has had
a very honorable record in the history of the half-century
which has passed since they entered upon their course as
students at Yale, but the happiest part of their record, as
related to my own personal life, is connected with the friendly
association in which I have been permitted by them to share.
Henry Robinson — for so I like to speak of him — was in
his college days what he has been in the long years that have
followed them. In his case, the boy was truly father of the
man. He had the same generous spirit, the same kindness of
heart, the same enthusiasm, the same readiness of thought and
of speech, the same manly character, the same truthful life, the
same warm affection. Those days were, indeed, at the begin-
ning, and were far distant from the end. But the beginning
for him was the beginning of growth, and the end was but the
richness and ripeness of the fruitage. I am glad that I saw the
progress and development of the years and knew, in their
passing onward, the fulfillment of the youthful promise.
I think of him now — as I have often thought of him
before — as having had a unique and a very happy career. It
was his good fortune to pass through his whole life in the
home of his childhood — in the city which he loved and of
which he became, as he moved on in his manhood, no unim-
portant part. He had the best elements of the old Hartford
character, and he carried in himself those elements of goodness
and of strength in all his living. He had, from the beginning,
a delightful home and gave to it, out of his own generous love
and devotion, a large measure of its joy. No one could see
him, or think of him, without knowing that his children must
love him as one of the kindliest of fathers. No one could enter
the circle of his friendship without realizing yet more fully
what he must be to those to whom he was bound by still closer
ties. The company of his friends was a large one — made up
of younger men, as well as older. The younger ones were
happy in the youthfulness of his affection. The older ones
renewed their youth as they met him and talked with him. In
his professional and public life he had most gratifying and
most honorable success — that success which comes from
ability and worth, from right principle and from true devotion
to the welfare of others. In his Christian living he was large-
minded, generous, full of love and good works, a disciple of the
Master, who had received much of the Master's spirit. As life
was advancing he gained more and more of that which makes
the later years full of satisfaction and of peaceful enjoyment,
and became more joyfully prepared for the future. He has
died in the fullness of his ripe and complete manhood. Surely
we may say that his career has been a happy one, ordered
in loving kindness by the Divine Father. Surely we may
follow him in our thoughts into the life beyond with much
thankfulness for the past, and with great and blessed hopes for
the future.
I know that his friends in his own city, who have been so
long and so intimately acquainted with him, will say to one
another, in these passing days, what is more worthy of him and
more justly appreciative than I have said. But, as we bid him
farewell, I hope that the words of a friend who, though living
elsewhere, recalls in pleasant memory the earlier days and the
later ones, may be allowed a place among the testimonies of
friendship and of affection.
Timothy Dwight.
New Haven, February 14, 1900.
from president Perkins of the County Bar,
To the Editor of the Courant :
Death has removed from us the most shining ornament of
the bar of this county, if not of the state. As one who has
known him as long and perhaps as well as any one not of his
own family, allow me to say a few words.
We were born within a few months of each other and
attended school together from the time we were old enough
till 1849, when we both went to college. We studied law
almost together — I with my father and he with his brother
Lucius, were admitted to the bar in the same year, and have
18
since practiced law together. His kindness of heart and sweet-
ness of temper were such that, during- all that period, there has
never been an unpleasant word, or, as I believe, an unkind
thought between us, and this is perhaps the more remarkable
as to the best of my remembrance we were never engaged
together in a case, but were always on opposite sides, where it
so often happens that hasty words are spoken in the excitement
of a trial.
This is not the place to speak of his abilities as a lawyer, an
orator, or in any other of the many positions which he so well
and ably filled. I know of no other man in the state who
could fill his place. His death is a loss to the state, to his
family, and his friends, and especially to the few remaining
members of the bar, like myself, who have known, loved, hon-
ored, and respected him all our lives.
Charles E. Perkins.
from the F)on. George p. McLean.
To the Editor of the C our ant :
As one of Mr. Robinson's students and as one of his younger
friends for twenty- two years, it is unnecessary for me to say
that I learned to love him, and it is impossible for me to
express the deep sorrow that comes to me in the announcement
of his death.
I came to his office in 1879, having with me a letter of
introduction from a friend whom he knew. Mr. Robinson
told me that, as he already had three students in his office, I
could remain there only until he could find another place for
me. Daily after that I expected the dreaded change, but it did
not come.
I had heard much of his eloquence and learning before I
met him. I had not been in his office a month before I knew
that his heart was as sympathetic as a mother's. During the
eight years that I occupied the room next to his, his strong
and generous hand always seemed to be in mine. No matter
what I did or how I did it, he not only excused but defended
it. He did for me what my father could not do, and some-
times I felt that he helped me to the disadvantage of his own
sons.
When I was a member of the General Assembly he had
many important interests to protect, but he never allowed him-
19
self to discuss any of them in my presence. One day I went
into his room and called his attention to this fact. His reply
was, " My boy, I want you to look into both sides of my bills
and do as you think right without a suggestion from me, and
remember, vote as you want to." It was then I realized that
his sense of honor was absolute and his friendships uncon-
ditional. I always saw in him that safe, sure poise of the
qualities that make the highest order of citizenship. In the
home, in the office, in the court-room, in the capitol, on the
platform, in the forest, on the ball ground, in the parlor, he
was always the same cultured, brilliant, fearless, upright man
and friend.
The world to him was beautiful, full of good men and
women and noble purposes. He loved truth and family and
his fellowmen better than position or wealth. Life to him was
a precious link in the bright chain of eternity. If he had
faults they were as the dust invisible, in a book full of sweet
poetry, sound philosophy, charity, courage, and hope.
George P. McLean.
The Hartford Times of February 14th said :
Mr. Robinson was a foremost figure in New England Con-
gregationalism. He was known as a leader in notable assem-
blages of the denomination. Last fall he was a member of the
international council which met in Boston, and was an active
participant in its deliberations.
His writings were voluminous, covering wide and distinct
fields of research. His paper on the " Constitutional History
of Connecticut " was one of the best efforts from his pen, and
will be of unquestioned authority in the deliberations on that
subject which are to take place hereafter in legal and legislative
halls. His public addresses and orations were of the most
brilliant literary merit. The oration delivered at the unveiling
of the Putnam equestrian statue in Brooklyn was one of the
most remarkable specimens of oratory that have been produced
in Connecticut.
One of the most eloquent expressions of patriotism that the
veterans of the Civil War have listened to in this state came
from his lips, May 30, 1S85. Under the auspices of the Grand
Army in this city, he was the Memorial Day orator.
In this oration, the memory of which still lingers in the
hearts and minds of its hearers, Mr. Robinson laid down the con-
viction that : " There is such a thing as Christian thought in states-
manship, and it is consistent with the highest, truest manliness."
In the memorial address delivered in Rockville in 1897, Mr.
Robinson spoke with the old enthusiasm of Connecticut's ser-
vices in the country's behalf.
Mr. Robinson was kindly and generous at all times in his
dealings with men. His cheery word of " comrade," as he met
them in the street and in the office, had a tonic that could not
be forgotten in the duties and exactions of daily life. Mr.
Robinson was the enthusiastic friend of out-door games and
athletics, taking an increasing pleasure as the years advanced
in the athletic life at Yale. And here it may be said that he
was the typical Yale man, loving the university with the loy-
alty of a son, and counting its progress and history as of the
greatest value. He was a member of the Hartford Yale
Alumni Association, and was one of its first presidents.
Most of all, Mr. Robinson was a man of Christian belief and
character. He was a member of the South Congregational
church, and his religious life was exemplified in that body and
in the home of rare interest and charm which was dignified by
his presence and spirit. The catholicity of his faith was appar-
ent in every act and thought of his life. Religion presented no
narrowing influences in his examples of citizenship and neigh-
borly courtesies. His faith bore fruit that cannot be thought
of except with thankfulness that so good a man has lived and
worked and been an example to be imitated in the community
which he loved and honored so much.
6eneral F)awk/s tribute to Mi*. Robinson.
Special to the Coura?it :
Washington, February 14. /
On hearing of the death of the Hon. Henry C. Robinsoii
to-day, Senators Hawley said : " One more old friend gone —
during the nearW fifty years of our acquaintance, I never met
him when his kind soul failed to show itself in a pleasant smile
and a cordial grip of the hand, and his bearing toward all was
that of a friend. He was a gentleman of honor, able in his
profession, a lover of his country, public spirited, and sound in
judgment. His private life was stainless. His departure will
be sadly mourned by a great circle of friends and relatives."
New Haven Journal and Courier :
Henry C. Robinson, who died in Hartford yesterday, was a
good lawyer, a good business man, a good speaker and writer,
and a good citizen. Indeed, he was capable and efficient in
whatever he undertook, and the range of his activities was
wide. During a large part of his life he was prominent in
politics and public affairs, and his state and city have profited
by his public spirit, his sagacity, and his skill. He was wise
and tactful in his dealings with his fellowmen, kindly in spirit,
and given to good works. The Congregational church and the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions have
long felt the influence of his zeal and wisdom. He will be
greatly missed by many who have been accustomed to rely on
his counsel, and he will be long and sincerely mourned by
many who have been accustomed to rely on his friendliness
and good will. In his death, his family, his friends, his church,
his profession, his business associates, his city and his state
have met with a great loss.
New Haven Register :
To lose such a man is to reflect the more seriously and
fondly upon those who are left behind, and who are still in the
turmoil and battle of life which so often compel us to put off
appreciation of what is, in human character and association,
until its influence and radiance are stilled. It was a pleasure
to meet Mr. Robinson ; it was an honor to know him.
Springfield Republican :
Death came to Henry C. Robinson of Hartford, yesterday
morning, and in his departure that city and the State of Con-
necticut lose much. His ability as a lawyer was commanding
and his position at the bar long sustained, while as an influ-
ential personality in legislation and affairs he took rank among
the strongest men his state has produced. In literary acquire-
ment and eloquent speech the same rank was his, and he was a
leader among the Congregational laymen of New England.
He thus measured large in many lines.
New York Evening Post :
Mr. Robinson was very prominent in Congregational church
matters. As a corporate member of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions he took a leading part as
a liberal in the series of "great debates" on the question of
orthodox qualifications for missionaries. It was in one of those
debates that he coined the phrase, famous at the time, about
" venerable incorporators who elect venerable successors to the
venerable dead."
New York Tribune :
His grace and power as an orator caused him to be fre-
quently called upon to make memorial, welcome, and dedica-
tion addresses. He was the memorial orator at the Hartford
obsequies of President Garfield and General Grant, and he
delivered eulogies upon many prominent members of the
bar.
From the Hartford Post of February 14th : -
Henry C. Robinson, who died this morning at the age of 68,
united character with capacity, courage with courtesy, and
strength with sympathy, and he was at once a student and a
man of affairs. His death, not unexpected, removes from this
community a great personal force, and the regret which his loss
will beget will not be confined to Hartford or bounded by Con-
necticut.
Mr. Robinson represented an original type of mind, and he
didn't waste any time loitering around stores which dealt in sec-
ond-hand intellectual furniture. He was not disposed to take
things for granted, and with a faculty for mastery, he loved to
go to the bottom of matters and find out for himself. This
habit of thoroughness made him a recognized authority within
the range of his specialties, and gave to his views and utter-
ances an influence which a shallow intellect might envy but
could not achieve. Upon the constitutional and ecclesiastical
history of Connecticut he was an expert, and in delving into
this subject with his industrious shovel he spent many happy
hours. The breadth of his activities and the range of his sym-
pathies and of his scholarship may be indicated by the state-
ment that he could address a religious gathering on Sunday,
deliver a talk before a historical society on Monday, act as coun-
sel in some technical and complex case on Tuesday, be a felt
force in a railroad conference on Wednesday, and so on through-
out the week. The State has developed few men who have
23
had a greater fund of basic information on a larger class of
subjects than Mr. Robinson. He was never inclined, even for
the sake of temporary advantage, to permit a point to get the
better of a principle, and in his intellectual outfit no love for
professional trickery was listed and no fondness for double-
dealing was found. His robust character was a personal as
well as a public asset, and it enhanced his influence in courts of
justice as well as in the community.
Mr. Robinson was a man of eminent public spirit, and his
ten talents and much of his time were at the disposal of the
public, although upon him a large private business made many
and constant demands. The things which concerned the prog-
ress and upbuilding of the community concerned him, and for
any cause which promoted the general welfare he had a prompt
and helping hand. With numerous philanthropic and religious
enterprises has his name been officially linked. His judgment
was keen, and to it all accorded an attentive ear, and upon it
many were wont to rely. He knew Hartford and loved it
cordially. He knew Connecticut and was proud of it. He
knew his country and admired it. He was familiar with out-
door life, and in green fields, in the singing of birds, and in the
study of wild animals he found delight and recreation.
In the larger and better sense Mr. Robinson was a politi-
cian, and although he never cultivated the practice of shaking
the plum-tree, he was many times honored by positions of pub-
lic trust, and he never violated the confidence which his fellow-
citizens reposed in him. With legislation and with legislatures
he had much to do, but for what he did on Capitol hill, even in
the stormiest times, no apology was ever necessary and upon it
no shadow of suspicion was cast. The literary style with which
he clothed his utterances, oral and written, was incisive and
forceful, and his words were as direct as his statements were
lucid.
Mr. Robinson represented the best type of Connecticut citi-
zenship— and no citizenship is better than the best Connecticut
citizenship. Hartford is fortunate in having had such a man,
and is unfortunate in losing him forever, although the work
that he did and the influence which he exerted are not per-
ishable products.
24
&$r. ftobht£on'£ funeral.
The funeral services were held on Friday forenoon, Febru-
ary 1 6th, at eleven o'clock, in the Second Church of Christ
in Hartford, where Mr. Robinson had been so many years a
regular attendant upon public worship. The last service he
attended in that place most dear to him, was on Sunday
evening, December 31st, to hear the beautiful midnight ser-
vice for New Year's Eve, composed by his honored towns-
man and dear friend, Dudley Buck. The ensuing report of
the funeral services is taken, with slight alterations, from
the columns of the Hartford C our ant :
Simple but deeply impressive were the funeral services for
the late Henry Cornelius Robinson, ex-Mayor of Hartford, at
the South church yesterday morning. The church was crowded
to the doors with a representative gathering of business and
professional men, those connected with Mr. Robinson in the
various enterprises with which he was identified, clients and
friends all testifying by their presence to the regard and esteem
they felt for the distinguished lawyer and citizen. In the con-
gregation were clergymen, lawyers, judges, merchants, and
business men from all ranks, with a large number of railroad
officials and others from out of town. A corps of ushers seated
the people as they arrived, seats in the body of the church
being reserved for the various organizations with which Mr.
Robinson was identified. The ushers were George H. Gilman,
Francis R. Cooley, Austin Brainard, Robert P. Parker, Arthur
Day, Andrew F. Gates, Robert W. Huntington, Jr., and Col.
Francis Parsons. The bearers were Lucius F. Robinson, Henry
S. Robinson, and John T. Robinson, sons ; the Rev. Frank R.
Shipman of Andover, Mass., and Arthur L. Shipman of this
city, nephews ; Sidney T. Miller of Detroit, son-in-law ; Henry
Robinson Palmer of the Providence Journal, a nephew, and
Major Louis R. Cheney, a nephew by marriage.
4 25
The pulpit platform was banked with a wealth of floral
pieces composed of roses, violets, lilies-of-the valley, palms,
orchids, and other blossoms arranged in wreaths, placques,
sprays, and bouquets, all from organizations with which Mr.
Robinson was identified, and personal friends.
The services were conducted by Mr. Robinson's friend and
pastor, the Rev. Edwin P. Parker, D.D., assisted by the Rev.
Joseph H. Twichell, ex-President D wight of Yale University
also occupying a seat in the pulpit. The choir of the church,
under Mr. John M. Gallup's leadership, sang the evensong Re-
sponses, Newman's " Lead, Kindly Light," " How Gentle God's
Commands " to Dr. Parker's tune, " Dawn," which Mr. Robin-
son loved to hear, and the "Nunc Dimittis" set to music by
Mr. Robinson's old friend, Henry Wilson. There was no ad-
dress, but only the words of Holy Scripture, prayers, and sweet
music. Just before the closing prayer and Responses, Dr.
Parker read the verses composed by him and read at the
funeral, in the same place, of Richard D. Hubbard, prefacing
the recital by saying that the verses had much interested Mr.
Robinson at the time of their dear friend's funeral service, and
that they seemed no less pertinent to this than to that occasion.
The interment was in Cedar Hill Cemetery.
For the reasons given above, and because the verses are
a link of love between the souls of three very dear friends,
the following In Memoriam, read at Mr. Hubbard's funeral,
was also read at that of Mr. Robinson :
The lips are silent which alone could pay
His worthy tribute. We can only lay
The laurel on his breast,
And bear him to his rest,
And say, farewell, dear soul, till break of day.
Amid the fickle and faint-hearted throng,
His heart was ever steadfast, brave, and strong.
His counsel gave us light,
His courage gave us might —
To see the right, to wrestle with the wrong.
That sturdy, stalwart presence was a tower
Of strength and hope, in many a trying hour.
In friendship warm and wise,
In large self-sacrifice,
In countless kindnesses we proved his power.
26
Dear brother-soul ! within that realm unknown
Where thy good spirit now from us hath flown,
Canst thou look back and see
How lonely, without thee,
And how impoverished our world has grown?
In purer light dost thou now clearly scan
The lines of truth so dim to mortal man?
Dost see, amid our gloom,
The beauty and the bloom
Of some inclusive and unfolding plan ?
Are mysteries disclosed? Misgivings stilled?
Dark doubts disproved? Hope's prophecies fulfilled?
We only hear our cries
Re-echoed from the skies,
In the vast, awful silence God has willed.
Oh, brother sweet ! What would'st thou have me say ?
Sleep well, fare well ; the night is for the day
And not the day for night !
Sleep well, till morning light
Shall break thy rest, then rise and go thy way.
27
At a meeting of the Hartford County Bar, held on Friday,
February 15th, a committee, consisting of Judge William
Hamersley, Judge David S. Calhoun, and Hon. William
Waldo Hyde, was appointed to draft resolutions on the
death of Mr. Robinson, and to report the same at an ad-
journed meeting. On the forenoon of Monday, February
19th, the adjourned meeting was held in the superior court
room. President Charles E. Perkins presided, and opened
the meeting with a few introductory remarks. Judge Ham-
ersley presented the Report of the Committee, as follows :
" On behalf of the committee appointed at our last meeting,
I present for your consideration a minute upon the death of
Mr. Robinson, and move its adoption."
Report of Resolutions Committee.
The Hartford County Bar places upon record this minute in
memory of Henry C. Robinson, who died Feb. 14, 1900.
Mr. Robinson was admitted to the bar in 1855. He became
at once engaged in practice, which soon increased in extent and
importance. For the past thirty years and more he has been
one of the few foremost lawyers whose ability and character
have influenced and distinguished the State bar. In consulta-
tion he was suggestive and resourceful, in preparation thorough,
in the combats of trials equipped with all the weapons of a sin-
gularly clear and alert mind, directed with the force of a com-
bative and intense earnestness. In addressing a jury he was
eloquent, forceful, and persuasive ; in the discussion of pure
questions of law he sought above all to discover the controlling
principle of law, and had a clearness of statement and wealth
of illustration in its presentation that made his arguments ever
attractive and powerful.
His strong personality produced a marked influence peculiar
28
to himself, not only in the profession, but in all the relations
of life. In the church with which he was associated he was a
power for good from his earliest years. As a citizen he was
progressive and patriotic, urging with his ardent insistence
whatever seemed to him for the public good. The highest
honors of public life in the State and nation were within his
reach, but had not the power to draw him from his chosen pro-
fession. He twice accepted the nomination for the chief mag-
istracy of his native State, when defeat was probable, and de-
clined it when election followed nomination. He put aside the
offer of an important foreign mission pressed upon him with
flattering urgency. But his eloquence of speech and pen were
always at the service of the public. The field of literature was
most attractive to him, and his efforts in this direction indicate
the success he might have won as an author. As friend and
companion his charm was of a rare quality ; it was all his own ;
the mingling of cordiality, humor, thoughtfulness, and enthu-
siasm.
His long career as a member of this bar has been marked
by continuous work which has aided in raising the standard of
the profession, in developing a sound jurisprudence, in increas-
ing the respect for justice, and which will always associate his
memory with our most treasured traditions.
Judge Hamersley, in speaking to the resolutions, said : —
In taking this action I assume for the time being my place
as an active member of this bar. I join once more the circle
most dear to me, which has marked the limits during a lifetime
of my work and aspirations and closest friendships ; and I ask
the privilege of saying a few words of our late associate from
an open heart — as brother speaks to brother.
Very soon after my admission to the bar, my office joined
that of Lucius and Henry Robinson. It was at Henry's sug-
gestion that Lucius, whose brilliant capacity had already won
for him a high place as leader, asked me, a boy of 21, to appear
with him in a case of some importance before the Supreme
Court of Errors. The following year the death of his brother
left to Henry the unexpected preparation of several cases for
the next term of the Supreme Court, and he associated me with
him in those cases. The opportunity thus given was largely
influential in further advancement. There are many others at
29
this bar who are deeply indebted for their early progress to
friendly aid from Mr. Robinson. I dwell on this because it
furnishes, in some degree, a key to the character of the man.
He had, not as an occasional impulse, but as an ever-present
motive, a certain instinct of helpfulness which dominated often-
times unconsciously his whole life. There are some lives that
are like a smooth sheet of water, which changes not, except as
it reflects with pleasing faithfulness its surroundings. The life
of Mr. Robinson was far from such as this ; it was more like a
cluster of springs, each different from the other, and sparkling
with the freshness of youth, uniting in unexpected combi-
nations, but moving on in obedience to an unseen and unceas-
ing force in a mission of wholesome service. It was this vari-
ety of characteristics, some seemingly contradictory, all bub-
bling with the spirit of irrepressible youth, that was his great-
est charm ; and it was the ceaseless motive behind all, the con-
stant pervading purpose of helpfulness and right doing, that
was his greatest power. His was a very human nature, full of
impulse, enjoying the manly excitement of strife, swift to in-
dignant repelling of wrongful attack, most responsive to healthy
merriment ; but backed by a tender and true conscience that
sooner or later impressed its soft controlling influence on all his
impulses and purposes. He had an intense repugnance to in-
justice and wrong that would seek expressions in vigorous de-
nunciation and opposition ; but he was tolerant, most tolerant
of the unhappy wrong-doer. He loved to help his friends, but
more than all he loved to help. His heart was catholic. Is it
strange that such a man, in the many diverse relations of life
which he has been called to fill, has found in each a host of
warm personal friends ? Is it strange that such a character,
when united with the highest intellectual gifts, should have left
those results of faithful work that compel us to honor his mem-
ory, and which form for his children a legacy beyond value ?
In asking the adoption of this minute I represent your com-
mittee and the whole bar ; but in doing so, I wish also to ex-
press for two friends of more than fifty years, my own heartfelt
tribute of admiration, respect, and love.
Olbat ludgc Calhoun Said.
Judge David S. Calhoun spoke as follows :
The death shaft which struck down Henry C. Robinson has
30
wounded me sorely. Not only did it despoil the little travel-
marked company of us, the elders of this bar, of our brightest
and most hopeful companion, but for me it ended, except in
memory, an exceptional and valued friendship of more than
forty years.
I have known Mr. Robinson since, in the ardor of youth, he
commenced the study of law in the office of his gifted brother.
I have watched his intellectual and professional growth and his
so expanding influence, that in his later life he seemed to be
an almost omnipresent and necessary force in every important
public movement in this community. And I have gladly seen
him reaping from his wide labors abundant harvests of success
and honor.
And now that this strong and manful brother and stanch
friend has gone, it would seem that words of just estimate
and loving tribute would come easily. But his death was to
me so unexpected, so startling and remindful, that as yet a
voiceless feeling demands the first place.
Still I would not come empty-handed into this gathering of
his generous brothers of the bar. With the other more fitting
tributes to his memory I will offer a brief and simple one.
Mr. Robinson's position and influence did not rest on his
professional ability alone ; that, though of the first rank, was
only a block in the structure.
We of the bar are naturally given to estimate each other by
a purely professional standard ; which, in a sense, seems a
measurement of comparative height rather than of dimensions.
In thus saying I would in no wise depreciate the attainments or
the honors of the great lawyer. They are worthy of any man's
best efforts, and are generally satisfying.
But occasionally one comes whose gifts and ambitions are
so manifold that they cannot be hemmed within the usual
bounds of a professional path, but they break out into other
fields of thought and labor for their full expression and
achievement.
And such a rare man was Mr. Robinson. His mind was so
versatile — his tastes so varied — his enthusiasm so pervading,
and his activity so restless, that the law, in which he was
eminent, did not give him " ample room and verge enough."
Exacting as were his professional labors, he was yet a care-
ful and loving observer of nature ; he shared with men of
31
business the direction of great enterprises ; as a citizen, or a
trusted magistrate, his keen interest in public affairs and his
thorough study of the true principles of wise government were
conspicuous ; his admirable essays on various subjects, and
given to the public, show how wide was the range of his
research and thought ; he gathered and assimilated the best of
general literature, and he was ever earnestly and intelligently
helpful in the higher work of Christian benevolence.
Whatever he did was with a fervid impulse ; and controlling
and inspiring the whole man was his generous and sympathetic
heart.
He was indeed a man of many parts ; each so strong and
attractive that together they showed a rare and finely com-
posite character.
One referring to him can add no limiting appellation — it
must be only as Henry C. Robinson.
Perhaps as little as any lawyer I have known, did he carry
the impress of the office or the court room.
But doubtless the many will most vividly recall him as a
public speaker, whose addresses on widely different subjects
and occasions showed a store and variety of knowledge, a style
clear and vigorous, yet enriched by illustration and imagery, a
masterly perception of the power, beauty, and refinement of
our mother-tongue, and greater than all, the uplifting senti-
ment and the strong and sincere feeling without which words
are vain.
No wonder that with such ability, to instruct, and charm,
and move, he became, as so well expressed by his pastor, " Our
' chief speaker.' " But —
The silver trumpet's sound is still.
Sdbat RKUtam SCJatdo f)yde Said.
Ex-Mayor William Waldo Hyde said :
Mr. President : I do not feel that I can remain silent on
this occasion, although I know how ill-fitted I am to speak of
the life of our deceased friend and leader. For thirty-five
years I have felt the good influence of the strong friendship
which he ever showed to four generations of my immediate
family. From my grandfather to my children — we have all
felt the benefit of his love and good will, and, representing
32
those who have gone before, I most gladly testify to the rever-
ence and love which I feel toward our departed friend. As I
look back on the long period which has passed, every event of
special joy and every occasion of especial trial has in some way
a sweet association with Mr. Robinson. He was always ready
with his love and approbation to make happier those things
which we could enjoy, and in time of sorrow his sympathy did
much to lighten oiir grief. His hearty handgrasp and strong
words of encouragement were always ready, and he little
realized how much we had learned to depend on him.
The great dominating feeling in our hearts to-day is one of
wonder as to how we shall get on now. It seems impossible to
think of Hartford without him. To speak of his great ability is
a needless task for me. Others older and better equipped can
do that more happily than I.
I have always, however, felt that in him was evidenced a far
greater share of those gifts which belong to greatness than
most men possess. Jealousy, which belittles so many natures,
was absent from him. He loved to see others succeed. He
was ready to help on those less fortunate than himself and let
them get the credit of many things which but for him they
would never have thought of. The results of his ministering
love can be found in many younger men who have grown up
under his influence, and who to-day shed their tears at his
grave. He had another quality which seems to me pertains to
all the great men of our profession. He could fight as hard as
the hardest, and yet, after the battle was over, the sting was
never left to rankle. He was of that large family of lawyers
who could give and take without afterwards either remember-
ing the wounds he had received or glorying in those he had
given. Our admiration has often been awakened by his ability
in getting at the important point and driving it home so as to
convince the court or the jury.
It sometimes seems as if the lawyers of the old school had
more of these qualities than have we to-day. We all feel, I
think, that there are two distinct classes of lawyers recognized
throughout the profession : the lawyer who is feared for his
ability, and, while taking no undue advantage nor resorting to
underhanded methods or acts, is sure to prove no mean antag-
onist. And then there is that other class of lawyers — happily
not numerous, but that they do exist we must all admit — who
5 33
are feared not for their ability but rather for the methods and
means which they are willing to employ.
I sometimes wonder whether the times are changing and
the spirit pervading the bar is different, or whether it is
because with increasing years the ranks of those whom we
have made our examples and whom we have learned to respect
and to love, are constantly growing less, that it seems difficult
for us to believe that there is to-day in the bar the same
strength and the same devotion to law for its own sake which
were taught by those older men as the foundation of true
success in the profession. Doubtless it is because of the latter
rather than the former reason that such a question is some-
times raised.
As one by one those strong men have passed away and the
question is presented to us whether it has paid for them to
live and work and then die and be forgotten except by those
who have known them intimately, it seems to me that there is
only one answer which can be given. It has been their privi-
lege to give to us ideals, which, if we can but realize, will
make us in our day as worthy of remembrance as were they in
theirs ; and to us on our part, how inestimable is the advantage
simply to be able to remember them, to have known them, and
that we have had the privilege of seeing their successes.
Surely, when a man has lived and gone through all the vicissi-
tudes which pertain to the successful lawyer's career, most of
his time being given to the aid of others, and but little time to
think solely of himself, it is a great reward, if, when he has
passed away, others may feel the effect of his influence and
good works and try in the days to follow to imitate his course.
This is about all there is left to us when death removes a shin-
ing member of our profession.
It seems to me that it is enough should it be our fortune to
occupy such a position at the end as our friend does to-day.
Remarks by ludgc Dwigbt Loomis.
Judge Dwight Loomis spoke as follows :
I think such a remarkable character as that of Mr. Robin-
son, in order to do justice to his memory, requires some pre-
sentation, some careful anatysis, of that remarkable character ;
but I concur in all that has been said most heartily. No one
34
could have had greater admiration or respect for Mr. Robinson
than myself. His well-rounded character in every respect was
most remarkable. He was a practical business man, and yet he
had a most aesthetic taste ; he was practical, and yet he was
ideal — idealic in his aspirations ; no man was ever more so.
And it is most remarkable that he touched so many sides in a
most eminent degree ; he was gifted as an orator, gifted in the
use of elegant language and rhetoric, and yet he was gifted in
his logical power. But, as I say, I feel as if were I to continue
with unpremeditated remarks I should fail to do justice to his
memory. I feel his loss keenly, as I have felt keenly the loss
of many eminent lawyers that have taken their departure.
When you come to think of it, what a long procession of emi-
nent men have departed from us.
Remarks of ^wdgc 8. O. prentice.
Judge Samuel O. Prentice said :
Mr. President : I feel quite as Judge Loomis has expressed
the matter, that this, of all occasions, is the one most unfitted
for unpremeditated remarks. I came here this morning with-
out knowing that this meeting was to be held, and consequently
have thought of nothing to say, and I feel it would be worse
than folly, for me at least, to attempt to express my feelings
without any premeditation whatever.
When I came to the bar twenty-five years ago, I found here
a coterie of men who had won their honors at the bar, and
among them was Mr. Robinson, in the full panoply of his mid-
life hours. During all my professional and judicial career until
now he has remained, in my thoughts at least, and in fact, one
of the leaders of the bar of this county and this State — one of
the men to whom I have been wont, as long as I have thoughts
of law at all, to look up to as a man to imitate and emulate. It
was not my privilege to be thrown with him especially inti-
mately, as has been the privilege of some men, but it was my
privilege to be thrown with him with some degree of intimacy ;
and added to the respect and honor which I paid him as man
and lawyer, there came to me a love for his manly qualities, for
the heart side of him, which has endeared him to me and made
him represent to me not only one of the leaders of our profes-
sion but one of the leaders we may well cherish with honor,
35
love, and affection. So that I feel to-day as if we had lost not
only one of our foremost but one of our best. I wish that I had
thought of speaking further to-day, but not having done so I
think I will say no more.
3udge Rentiers Remarks.
Judge William F. Henney spoke as follows :
As one of the older graduates of Mr. Robinson's office, it has
been thought appropriate that I should say a word in favor of
these most fitting resolutions. But the performance of a task
demanded by every consideration of gratitude and friendship is
rendered well-nigh impossible by the shock of personal loss.
As I stand here to-day thronged upon by the memories of a
thousand kindnesses, surrounded, as it were, by so great a cloud
of witnesses to his loyalty and love, it were idle for me to
attempt analysis.
It must suffice to call attention briefly to a few of the char-
acteristics, professional and personal, which most sensibly im-
pressed me through twenty-five years of happy intimacy.
Like truth, our friend was many-sided, and presented from
whatever point of view a unique and charming personality. In
the forty-five years he practiced his profession he enriched the
jurisprudence of the State. In the great causes that were liti-
gated during that period he bore a prominent part.
His death, as it seems to me, marks the closing of an epoch
in the professional life of the State. Hitherto professional abil-
ity was one thing and business capacity quite another. To-day
the commercial spirit is predominant, and great interests
are looking to the bar not so much for legal attainments as for
competent business sagacity, the ability to bring things to pass.
Busy commercialism with its demands upon the profession
may produce lawyers of comprehensive business grasp, of
shrewd financial forecast, of large administrative capacity ; but
never will it bestow upon a grateful community a Hubbard or
a Robinson. They belong to an epoch when law was a science
and the practice of it a profession. Prevailing influences at no
distant day will make of the law a trade and of the law office a
shop. Mr. Robinson saw this tendency and deplored it. He
wanted no one in the profession who had not a genuine zeal for
the law, or who followed it only for what there was in it. His
36
arguments always bore testimony to his legal acumen and
scholarship, and his brief was invariably an elegant epitome of
legal principles.
In any forum he was a dangerous antagonist ; for his intense
earnestness, his facility of illustration, his incisive logic, his
fervid delivery, his ready and sparkling wit, above all the hon-
esty and candor of his argument, armed him with hypnotic
power. He looked with distrust on novel and multiplying rules
of practice, on technical pleadings and fattening files. The
technical controversies of the short calendar had no charms for
him.
In his professional relations he was ever generous and con-
siderate of others. The gratification afforded by his forensic
triumphs was always chastened by a manly sympathy for his
fallen antagonist. His knowledge of Constitutions, federal and
State, was acute and ample, and the discussion of constitutional
questions called into fullest exercise his marvelous powers. He
had an instinct for legal principle that was unerring, and a mind
quick to grasp and to analyze. In a search for authorities he
would seem to digest a library while less gifted counsel was
conning a book.
Viewed from other standpoints Mr. Robinson was still inter-
esting and attractive. He loved simplicity. Ceremonies, pa-
geants, and liveries were all distasteful to him as so many out-
croppings of aggressive vanity. He indulged a hearty con-
tempt for all things tainted with sham or insincerity ; and yet,
over the multitude of human foibles, many of them amusing,
not a few distressing, he spread the generous mantle of a
matchless charity. He was mindful in all his public utterances
of the warning of Scripture, " Though I speak with the
tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am noth-
ing."
In his judgment of his fellows I never knew him — I ven-
ture to say none in this presence ever knew him — assign to
conduct an unworthy motive when explainable on any other
ground.
Mr. Robinson's instincts and aspirations were all scholarly.
He reveled in the domain of letters. The most grateful tri-
umph of his literary career was the graceful act of the univer-
sity he loved in conferring on him the degree of Doctor of Laws.
He was a teacher in the best sense of that term, and preferred
37
example to precept. He saw truth clearly ; and in his life and
conversation, it found abundant and adequate expression.
It is this teacher element in a man that lasts longest and
rings truest. Were the influence of attainments and charac-
ter limited to the narrow span of the individual life, its sphere
of usefulness were pitifully contracted. Not for the day and
hour only did the supreme intelligence mould, build up, and
develop this splendid personality. Untold generations have
each contributed their just proportion to the make-up of this
masterful manhood, and the myriad generations that follow
shall know his potent manifestations in ever widening circles of
influence and power.
It was a sense of this truth, as it always seemed to me, that
inspired his well-known views of the dignity and responsibility
of life. He felt that his influence for good or ill was an influ-
ence forever, and to this view may be attributed his moral
power. It was from this fountain that he drew the intensity of
thought and expression which constituted his real charm as an
orator. His elegant rhetoric was but the result of a desire to
present his convictions becomingly dressed. But the most in-
teresting side of Mr. Robinson's character was the spiritual.
Once in touch with that, you saw the man himself. He con-
fronted one with a prodigal splendor of moral excellences. He
was above all things cheerful and hopeful, and saw in the stress
of present evil but the transient shadow beclouding the infinite
love. There was no tinge of agnosticism in his make-up. In
him faith was knowledge, and the trust breathing lines of Whit-
tier were dear to his heart. His views of nature and of his rela-
tions to it were vast and comprehensive. He realized instinct-
ively the oneness of the universe, and recognized the same
supreme intelligence regulating the beatings of his own heart,
prompting the aspirations of his own spirit, pulsing through
limitless spaces, and guiding the remotest star.
For the cynic and the pessimist his heart went out in pity.
He shared the sentiment so beautifully expressed in the verses :
Alas ! for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress trees ;
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away
Nor looks to see the rising day
Across the mournful marbles play.
Who has not learned, in hours of faith
38
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose his own.
And so it came to pass that upborne by the unflagging faith
that was in him he attained a nobler eminence on " life's
rugged mountain side," than it is given most of us to know,
commanding from day to day, through a widening horizon,
ever broader expanses and sublimer realities of ineffable good-
ness and power.
Looking backward over his fifty years of industry and
endeavor, so large, so various, so brilliant, and above all else,
so honest, who shall assign limitations to the activities of that
lofty spirit ? By what means shall we estimate the values of
the lessons of that instructive tongue !
Such are some of the aspects of this remarkable and gifted
man as I knew him in the seclusion of his study and in the
varying phases of his public life. What he was, what he must
have been, to those endeared to him in the intimacies of the
family circle, we partly may conjecture, but they alone can
know.
And now in this hour of sadness, when silent is the voice so
often lifted in generous eulogy of others, when dumb and
speechless are the lips whose loftiest eloquence alone could do
him justice, we are cheered by the reflection that that intense
and inspiring personality shall continue to permeate the hearts
and homes of the community he loved, with the myriad influ-
ences of a beautiful life and the fragrance of a blessed memory.
Remarks by fdr. Hustin Brainavd.
Mr. Austin Brainard spoke as follows :
Having attained pre-eminence in the esteem of the bar of
this state, Henry C. Robinson has passed into wider activities
and fields of greater usefulness and greater peace.
So many members of the Hartford county bar have seldom
been together as when they joined in the simple and harmoni-
ous services of Friday last. All felt that the law had lost an
eminent disciple, the state a useful citizen, and each and all of
us a friend.
As mayor of this beautiful and typical American city he
anticipated in fact if not in words the dictum that " Public
39
Office is a Public Trust," and put into the commonplace of
everyday administration the most advanced theories of official
integrity. His motto was always " I serve," and no finer motto
has ever graced the shield of chivalry.
As a private citizen he was always with the forces of
progress, no good cause lacked his support, no evil cause but
felt the weight of his condemnation.
As a friend his counsel was wise and his sympathies
catholic. As a counselor in matters professional his advice
was daily sought by young members of the bar. Generously
given, it was helpful, forceful, and invaluable.
As was said on the death of Lowell : " Intellectual excel-
lence, noble character, public probity, lofty ideals, art, litera-
ture, honest politics, righteous laws, conscientious labor, public
spirit, social justice, the stern, self-criticising patriotism which
fosters only what is worthy of an enlightened people, not what
is unworthy — such qualities and achievements, and such alone,
measure the greatness of a state, and those who illustrate them
are great citizens. They are the men whose lives are a glorious
service, and whose memories are a benediction."
Remarks of Charles €. Perkins.
President Perkins, being asked by Mr. Hungerford to
speak, said :
I do not feel, gentlemen, like speaking on this subject. Too
many sensations would come over me, and I would hardly be
able to trust myself. We all know what Mr. Robinson was.
We all know that everything that has been said here is, if any-
thing, less than the truth ; and it is entirely unnecessary for
me to retail again his abilities, his capacities, his kindness,
goodness, and all his qualities ; and I could not trust myself to
speak to you on the subject. I should not desire, in the pres-
sence of this meeting, to be unable to speak, and I think I
should be if I should try.
Remarks of Joseph L. Barbour.
The Hon. Joseph L. Barbour said :
I did not mean to say a word, but I have very great affec-
tion for Mr. Robinson — very great affection from the time
when I was admitted to the bar, when I was beginning, when I
40
was feeling my way — as for a while we all are. From the
first, whenever I wanted to ask a question, whenever I wanted
advice, and found my way to Mr. Robinson's office — and I
did often — I shall never forget the quickness with which
he would abandon whatever he was doing, and devote himself
earnestly to the service I asked. It is one of the things a
young man, starting out, appreciates. One of the lessons we,
growing older, might learn from his life is to extend a helpful
hand to the young men beginning, and not to ride roughshod
over them when we get a chance. If we can learn that lesson
from him, it will be a good thing for us.
While Brother Henney was speaking, what he said suggested
to me as singularly appropriate some lines that have been float-
ing in my mind ever since Mr. Robinson's death, running some-
thing like this :
" Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still traveling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men. "
It seems to me that is an apt simile. And another quotation
I found in reading, the other night, a translation of a funeral
oration by Georgius, an old Grecian orator, and which seemed
particularly applicable to Mr. Robinson : " For what was there
lacking in this man which good men ought to possess ? And
what qualities did he possess which men ought not to possess ? "
The resolutions were then passed unanimously and the
meeting adjourned.
41
In almost all the newspapers of Connecticut, and in a great
many of other States, far and near, the tidings of Mr. Rob-
inson's departure was noted with tender tributes to his
memory, and often with appreciative and felicitous com-
ments upon his personal character and public services.
From these numerous and varied notices the following are
selected for reproduction here : —
From Colonel Norris G. Osborn's Letter to the New
York Sunday Herald :
Connecticut is constantly called upon to bear the loss of ser-
vices of some man who has added materially to her honor, and
at the same time been jealous of her good men. I have been
called upon to review the life and career of several within the
few years the Connecticut edition of the Herald has enjoyed its
existence, and it is always a task made heavy by the realization
that the loss to the State was a real one.
Every man who has reached the age of middle life has had
occasion to see good men and noble women drop by the
wayside, causing a real vacuum in particular places, but that
the great human procession moves on without delay. This ob-
servation has brought to many a keen sense of the ridiculous,
and straightway made of them cynics. To others it has un-
folded the well-ordained purposes of Providence, and put upon
them that great sense of duty which reveals itself in a cheerful,
industrious, helpful, and useful life.
Henry C. Robinson was a splendid representative of the lat-
ter class. I recall him by the graveside of the late Isaac H.
Bromley, his classmate, to whom he was an appreciative and
devoted friend. The body had been lowered and the services
concluded. A tear stole down his cheek as he remarked to me,
" Dear old Ike has gone. It is for us to go back to our work
more determined than ever. That is the righteous law of life."
42
Mr. Robinson occupied a solid and at the same time a char-
acteristic place in the life of Connecticut. He had seen some-
thing of public office, but more of public men. What he saw
of the former was due more to the recognition, by others, in
him of superior worth and honesty than to any fancy on his
part for office. He would have been a power in Congress, the
nomination for which he could have had for the asking, but it
seemed to be his fate in life to let his own sense of usefulness
have full sway and lead him where it would.
There is little sordid ambition in such a nature, no pluming
of self over neighbor, and no suspicion of undervalued worth.
He was sunniness and warmth itself, and when surrounded by
those of whom he was fond or in whom he felt a confidence, his
reserve burst its iron bounds and expressed in the most
genial ways the delicious sense of humor and philosophy that
was his.
Mr. Robinson was best known to the people of Connecticut
as a lawyer and orator. As the years rolled by and his ascent
up the professional ladder continued without a break, his name
was mentioned early by men who were at the moment naming
the leading lawyers of the State. If there was a dignified pub-
lic oration to be delivered, his services were first sought ; if the
gathering were a Yale one it was his democratic utterance and
charming imagery that brought the men to their feet with
cheers and laughter.
I have always been accustomed, without a good reason other
than my desire, to regard him as I did Bromley, as belonging
to the people generally, as distinguished from the man or men
who are forever posing as the conservator of one idea or one
philosophy.
He was strong in his religious and political faith, but his
heart was open and his sympathies at the disposal of men who,
though equally intent upon their beliefs, were charitable and
liberal-minded. A lover of nature and a creature of the soil,
he was a hater of shams and humbug, and could be found fight-
ing them wherever exposed.
Such a career as Mr. Robinson's was suggests to those who
see value and example in it how much more substantial the
legacy is he leaves to his family and friends than that left in
immense piles of gold. The usefulness of the producing mil-
lionaire is by no means to be underestimated, for he employs
43
labor and stimulates industry, but, after all, the man who does
his work well and honorably, as did Mr. Robinson, and leaves a
name which is synonymous with charitable work, with genial
accomplishments, modest wants, and true friendship, has done
more to my fancy and imagination.
From the Yale Alumni Weekly : —
Of all the older Yale men one could hardly be selected
whose death meant a personal loss to so many, both young and
old, as does the death of the Hon. Henry C. Robinson of Hart-
ford. It was not because of his public positions and public ap-
pearances, although the former were many and honorable, and
although the latter won hearts as well as applause. Mr. Rob-
inson is missed and mourned in the Yale family because he was
such a good friend to so many — and particularly to so many
young men. It was often a wonder to those of us who were
given, from time to time, evidence of his thoughtful friendli-
ness, that our affairs and hopes were a matter of concern to one
whose mind and heart were so crowded with great interests
and close intimacies.
It need hardly be said that, as senior member of the Advis-
ory Board of this paper, he was always ready to give its plans
and its problems his disinterested thought. How much of a dif-
ference his presence made at Yale meetings at Hartford and
Yale meetings in other places ; and indeed everywhere. How
interested he was in everything that went on here, and how
sanely and helpfully he viewed things and advised men. He
was a good and helpful friend and supporter of Yale, just as he
was of very many men of Yale.
From the Hartford Courant :
The death of Henry C. Robinson is, to me, an irreparable
loss ; I have not seen him in ten years — but what of that? The
influence of Christian manhood upon the human soul is not
measured by years but by the " power of an endless life " ;
Henry Robinson was a Christian optimist ; he could not have
been otherwise ; his inherited tendencies were Christian, and
with his cheery temper and wealth of affection, love of God and
love of man were most natural and easy. During my five
years' residence in Hartford (1853-1858) I saw him almost daily
and deeply loved him. His power with young men was won-
44
derful — a tower of strength both to him and to them ; during
the great religious awakening of 1857 no man could have re-
placed Mr. Robinson in his peculiar Christian service with the
young, — tactful, generous, manly, affectionate, frank, sincere,
gracious, resourceful, and free as a child from cant, his service
was most beautiful and rewarding ; while Bushnell (single
handed) was strangling Edwards's death-doom theology, Rob-
inson (Bushnell taught) was singing of the boundless mercy of
God and the pitying love of the Man Divine.
I am quite aware, Mr. Editor, that I am unveiling sacred
things, but as no man liveth to himself so no man dieth to him-
self, and what Henry Robinson was, as mirrored in what he
did, though a sacred possession, compels one to break silence,
even in sorrow, and in joyful memory of the past, to bid him
" Hail and Farewell."
Others may speak of Mr. Robinson as orator, lawyer, states-
man, man of letters or of business, but I prefer to speak of him
as manhood Christianized, for every work of his life, sacred or
secular, testifies to his enthusiastic devotion to noble ends.
Imperfect ? — yes, thank God for that ; but why tarry upon
imperfections which are incident to all human life, when we
have found the run of the river which has already borne our
brother into the city of God.
He was
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
S. L. WOODHOUSE,
February 16th. 809 President St., Brooklyn, N. Y.
45
®$tnute£ an& ftc£olution£
ADOPTED BY DIFFERENT ORGANIZATIONS WITH WHICH MR.
ROBINSON WAS INTIMATELY ASSOCIATED.
At the annual meeting of the Hartford Republican Club,
Dr. William M. Hudson, in behalf of the Executive Com-
mittee of the Club, offered the following minute regarding
the death of Mr. Robinson, the first President of the Club,
which was unanimously adopted :
The members of the Republican Club, assembled at their
annual meeting, place on record this minute of their apprecia-
tion of its first president, Henry C. Robinson, who died on the
14th day of February, 1900. How much of the success of the
organization is due to the genial presence, kindly manners, and
administrative ability of its first presiding officer it is difficult
to estimate or express ; but it is fully realized by all who have
known the grasp of his friendly hand and the sound of his wel-
coming voice. While his enthusiasm, energy, and judgment
made the success of the association a certainty, his devotion to
clean politics, gentlemanly methods and sound manners made it
a power for good in the community.
As scholar, lawyer, and legislator the state is deeply his
debtor. To him as its chief magistrate the city owes many of
its most useful institutions and wholesome regulations ; and
much of his thoughtful suggestion is engraven in its organic
law. As a member of this organization his social qualities were
pre-eminent, endearing him to all who were privileged to know
him as a charming companion and friend.
Sharing with the city and state that he loved the rich legacy
of his attainments and character, we spread upon our records,
in memory of him, this tribute of esteem and affection.
At a meeting of the Directors of the Hartford Steam
Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, held in their
office March 9, 1900, the following minutes upon the death
46
of Henry C. Robinson was adopted, and it was voted to
spread it upon the records of the company :
It is with profound sorrow that we record the death of
Henry C. Robinson, who has been a member of this Board for
nineteen years, having been elected February 15, 1881, and its
legal adviser from its early beginnings. His wide experience
in insurance and financial matters rendered his counsel and
advice invaluable. As an associate he was generous and con-
siderate of the opinions of others, kindly in his bearing, sympa-
thetic and courteous to all. His life and character have made
an enduring impression upon those who were brought into inti-
mate official and personal relations with him. We shall sadly
miss his kindly greetings, cheery words, and wise counsel. A
sense of loneliness pervades the atmosphere of our meetings as
we look upon the vacant chair. We record this minute as a
tribute to his memory and as a mark of our high esteem for his
life and character. Attest,
J. B. Pierce, Secretary.
At a meeting of the Board of Directors of The Connec-
ticut Fire Insurance Company held at the office of the Com-
pany the fourteenth day of February, 1900, the following
minute was on motion adopted, viz. :
The loss which has fallen on the city in the death of Henry
C. Robinson bears with peculiar weight upon this Company and
each one of its directors. For nearly thirty years he had as a
member of its Board given it the support and advice of an
earnest nature and a brilliant mind. In the varied experiences
of those years his courage never failed in adversity and his ap-
plause was never withheld in prosperity. His financial experi-
ence and legal attainments have played an important part in
the success which has attended the Company, and the directors
are doing but justice in paying this tribute to his memory.
Of the qualities which made him beloved his business friends
also may speak. Successful effort won his unstinted praise,
and he was more reluctant to criticise others than himself. He
never lost the enthusiasm of youth, and the brilliancy of his wit
was not tinged with malice or unkindness. His associates will
never forget his loyalty, the unrestrained and generous cora-
47
mendation of his broad and great nature, and the charm of his
most interesting personality.
A true copy from the minutes. Attest,
Charles R. Burt, Secretary.
At a special meeting of the Directors of the Hartford
Hospital, held at noon on February 17, 1900, at Number 815
Main street, Dr. Russell presented the following minute,
which the secretary was requested to spread upon the rec-
ords, and to send a copy of the same to the family of Mr.
Robinson :
It is fitting that we should notice the death of Mr. Henry C.
Robinson, who for many years was a Director in this Hospital.
While we join in the universal regret at his death, we may ex-
press our own views at the great loss we have specially sus-
tained. He gave to us at various times such good counsel, that
he ought to be particularly remembered. In whatever he was
interested, he gave his full thought, and that was considerate
and wise ; he was seldom absent from our meetings, and real-
ized that his duty as a good citizen was to support thoroughly
this institution. The claims made upon his time for this and
other benevolent objects were cheerfully granted, not grudg-
ingly, but as a part of the duty which we all owe to the public.
The claim fell upon him because he recognized this duty, and
thus proved himself a true friend of humanity.
He was genial, frank, honest. To his high professional
attainments he added a sense of right and goodness, that is
commendable in any man, which brought to him universal
esteem. His reputation as a good citizen will long live after
him, and will be a bright example for those who follow.
At a meeting of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance
Company, held February 23, 1900, the following minute and
resolution were unanimously adopted :
Henry C. Robinson was elected a Director of the Connecti-
cut Mutual in March, 1864. His associate directors at that time
were James Goodwin, president ; Zephaniah Preston, vice-pres-
ident ; Guy R. Phelps, secretary ; John C. Palmer, E. B. Wat-
kinson, Edwin D. Tiffany, General Nathan M. Waterman, Ed-
ward W. Parsons, Judge George S. Gilman, Marcus F. Hodges,
48
of New York, and Charles Lowell Thayer of Boston. By death or
resignation these one by one have passed out of the directorate
until in 1894 Mr. Robinson alone remained of their number.
The humane purpose of life insurance appealed strongly to
his sympathetic nature ; its technical and business problems and
relations enlisted his intellectual interest, and he familiarized
himself with them to a greater degree than is usual in one not
holding an executive position. He acted throughout as the legal
adviser of the company, and made a thorough and special study
of insurance law. By natural endowment, by intellectual acu-
men and broad grasp, by sympathetic interest, by study and
discipline, by great acquirements and unusual skill, he was a
strongly-equipped director. During the thirty-six years of his
service many important questions of policy and practice had the
action of the directors, and to them all he gave careful and in-
telligent attention. Most prominent, perhaps, among these
were the changes made in the basis and methods of distributing
surplus soon after his accession to the board, and the change in
the interest assumption in 18S2. To the consideration of all
questions he brought with his strong powers of clear analysis
and close reasoning a quick apprehension of what was progress-
ive and developmental, and its natural accompaniment, an en-
thusiastic courage ; but he also saw clearly what was funda-
mental and vital and must be conserved as such in existing
plans and methods. While the legal point of view was habit-
ual, it was tempered and held in balance by his humane and
generous nature, and the question of essential equity was never
out of sight. To his intellectual, business, and professional val-
ues, Mr. Robinson added that personal charm which made offi-
cial association a pleasure and a privilege ; and the directors
desire to place upon record their high appreciation of the value
of his long and faithful service, their deep sense of official and
personal bereavement, and the expression of their profound
sympathy for his sorrowing household.
Resolved, That the foregoing minute be spread upon the
records of the Company and that a copy thereof be transmitted
to the family of the deceased. Attest :
Herbert H. White, Secretary.
A Resolution adopted at a Special Meeting of the Board
of Managers of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the
American Revolution, held at New Haven, April 13, 1900 : —
In the removal, by death, of our late associate, Henry Cor-
nelius Robinson, our Society suffers one of the most serious
losses which it has ever experienced.
7 49
The influence of his wise counsel and eloquent utterances
has stamped upon our organization an impress of dignity and
fidelity to its purposes to which we owe, in large measure, the
standing which we have held among the State societies of our
order. The memory of his rare personal character will ever
remain with us as a shining example of patriotic citizenship
and Christian manliness.
This feeble tribute to his memory is recorded with a pro-
found sense of personal loss which finds no utterance in words,
but finds a compensation in the reflection that our Society is
better because he was our fellow-member, and that the world
is better because he lived in it.
At a meeting of the Board of Directors of The New
York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, held
pursuant to legal notice at the office of the company in the
city of New York, on Saturday, March 10, 1900, the follow-
ing minute was adopted : —
" With the deepest regret this Board minutes the death of
Hon. Henry C. Robinson, our late associate, who died on Feb-
ruary 14, 1900. Elected a Director of the Hartford and New
Haven Railroad Company in 1865, he served as a Director of
that company until its consolidation with this Company in 1872,
and thereafter continuously as a member of this Board. A
man of stalwart integrity, broad culture, gifted with rare ora-
torical ability and intellectual vigor, he brought honesty, cour-
age, and wisdom to all his duties. He has served as a member
of all the important committees appointed by the Board, and
has long been identified with the activity, progress, and success
of this Company. His long service, experience, and ability,
made him a conspicuous member of- this Board, and his enthu-
siastic devotion to the interests and usefulness of the Company
have been of inestimable value. Endowed with the most
charming social qualities and gifted with brilliant conversa-
tional powers, he was always welcome at our meetings. We
shall miss his genial courtesy not less than his sound advice.
This corporation, to whose development he gave the benefit of
his ripe experience, his great knowledge of men and affairs, and
his loyal service, has lost a most valuable officer.
" The Board directs that this minute be entered upon its
records and a certified copy thereof be forwarded to his imme-
diate family."
A true copy from the records. Attest :
Wm, D. Bishop, Secretary.
50
Zfyt pipe anti tjje p£altcrp mafce gtoeet meiofcip; but
a pleasant tongue i£ afcotoe tjem fcotj),
Mr. Robinson's unremitting industry, well known to all
who were familiar with his habits of study and work, is
attested by the number and diversity of discourses, essays,
lectures, reviews, and other papers, which, in addition to
his professional work, he was called or moved to prepare,
most of which were printed in the newspapers, or in
periodicals, or in pamphlets. In all this extra-professional
labor, not only his industry, but the fruitfulness of his
mind, the versatility of his intellectual gifts, and the breadth
of his thoughts and sympathies were also manifested. He
was deeply interested in all that pertains to human culture
and welfare, and his voice and pen were freely employed
for the elucidation and advocacy of those things which
make for the illumination and improvement of human life.
The range of topics which, from time to time, he discussed
was a wide one, and his treatment of the subjects which
engaged his attention was always intelligent and luminous.
Whether he spoke or wrote, or whether his subject was
legal, political, historical, religious, literary, educational,
civic, or artistic in its nature, his discourse or essay was
marked by careful study, original thought, apt illustration,
and a peculiarly felicitous and often eloquent form of
expression. His strictly extemporaneous talks were always
suggestive and often brilliant. He had, as his mother
before him also had, the poetic temperament, and could, and
did, on occasion, write graceful verse. Under the title of
" Hartford Authors," he wrote, many years ago, a series of
papers which appeared in one of the city newspapers, and
were marked by a distinct literary discrimination and del-
icacy. When Mr. Dudley Buck's " Forty-sixth Psalm" was
51
first produced here, in his native town, the most appreciative
review of it came from Mr. Robinson's pen. When Parepa
sang here in oratorio, his " Few Thoughts about Parepa,"
published in the Courant, were recognized by many as the
thoughts which had arisen in their minds, but which they
could not utter. When, later, Nilsson came, he rendered a
similar service. His obituary notices of prominent persons,
published from time to time in our city papers, were not
only tender tributes of friendship and affection, but admi-
rable specimens of fine character-portraiture. He could find
time to write an elaborate review of a new collection of
hymns and music, ora" Word about the Lobby," or a criti-
cism of the Life of Charlotte Bronte, or an essay on Fish
Culture, or a paper on " The Significance of Dome and
Tower," or a review of " Doctor Bushnell on Progress," or
an article on the " Reduction of Railway Fares and
Freights," or a series of sparkling letters to the New Haven
Palladium. One of the best of his earlier diversions was a
lecture in the old Hartford Seminary course on, " Art as a
Flower"; and another thoughtful and scholarly discourse
on a kindred subject was delivered by him before the
Hartford Art Association.
Meanwhile his political speeches and writings were
frequent. When Mr. Capron, of beloved memory, was
taken from this scene of his most valuable services as Prin-
cipal of the High School, Mr. Robinson delivered an
address which deeply moved all hearts, and revealed him
to Hartford people as their eloquent orator. His frequent
addresses at the High School, on different occasions, are
well remembered. His oration on the unveilins: of Ward's
statue of Putnam, and his later and more elaborate oration
at the dedication of the monument to Putnam, were every-
where applauded as singularly forcible, thoughtful, and
graceful works of genuine eloquence.
The pages of the New Englander were enriched by his
brilliant review of Arnold's " Light of Asia," by his argu-
ment for a " Liberal Construction of Creeds," drawn from
the usage of law, and by other articles as well.
Many still remember his noble address on the death of
52
President Garfield, spoken in the Second Church of Hart-
ford, and that on Luther, spoken in the Park Church.
His lectures, earlier and later, before the Law School in
New Haven, and those before the Kent Club in the
same city, were received with unusual favor.
His Decoration Day orations, at Hartford, at South
Manchester, and at Rockville, and his oration on Robert
Burns, are comparatively fresh in the remembrance of our
citizens, and are cherished with equal gratitude and pride.
At the Legislative Reunion, 1886, he was the orator of
the day, and his historical address on that occasion was
described as " a compendium of colonial and state legis-
lative history."
At the General Conference of Congregational Churches
at Norwalk, 1892, his address on " What shall We Do with
the First Day of the Week " was a most timely and sug-
gestive discussion of the " Sunday Question." Mention
may be made of his address on " Medicine and Law " at the
centennial celebration of the Hartford Medical Society ; of
his eulogy on General Grant ; of his discourse on Christian
Unity, at the Memorial Church in Springfield ; of his talk
to the Hartford ministers on the " Temperance Question as
Viewed from a Legal Standpoint " ; of his lecture in the
Y. M. C. A. course on " Representative Government " ; of
his Letter to the Courant on " Towns and Representation " ;
and of his article in the Yale Law Journal in favor of " Con-
stitutional Reform in Connecticut." Many important
papers of his are not even mentioned here. His strictly
political speeches are not noticed, nor the frequent talks on
various subjects, which he freely gave at request at
banquets, conferences, and festival occasions, nor the many
delightful papers which he read, from time to time, at dif-
ferent clubs.
The purpose of this sketch is simply to indicate how
versatile were his gifts, how broad was his culture, how
catholic were his intellectual and moral sympathies, and
how freely and generously he poured out from the treasures
of his fruitful mind things of delight and refreshment for
his fellowmen. This sort of work, enough for most men,
53
seemed to be a sort of recreation with him, and yet it all
came out, naturally enough, from the wide range of his
professional studies and interests. During his last illness he
told the writer how he had meditated and purposed to write
out a paper for the comparison and estimation of Drs.
Horace Bushnell and Samuel Harris, whom he regarded as
the two greatest theologians of our country in recent times.
In another conversation he spoke at length and most inter-
estingly of " The Old Jeflersonians " of Hartford, naming
and describing many of them, and speaking fondly of " the
last, but not the least of them," Mr. Alfred E. Burr, and
saying that he would like to write an article about them.
One of the last things which he wrote, and the last that was
printed was a brief, tender note to the son of Mr. Burr, in
which he expressed his regret that he was unable to pay the
tribute to his old friend which it was in his heart to do.
The last note which he penned or dictated was a brief
message, unique and precious, to his old friend and Pastor.
From the mass of miscellaneous discourses, essays, and
other papers by Mr. Robinson which fortunately have been
preserved, a few selections have been made, and are herein
appended, as fairly showing, perhaps, the quality of his
thought, and the diverse phases of his meditations and
expressions of truth. No attempt has been made to repro-
duce his forensic speeches, or even to present any illustra-
tions of them. Nor has it seemed wise to dismember his
more solid and substantial historical papers and addresses,
for the sake of taking fragments from them.
In justice to his comprehensive grasp of constitutional
and political principles, to his powers of argumentation, to
his lore as a scholar, and to his best literary gifts, it should
be said that quite a different selection might have been
made, which would have seemed not less suggestive and
instructive than that which has been made. But such a
selection must of necessity have been far more extensive
and less varied than was deemed suitable for the purposes
of this memorial.
Edwin P. Parker.
54
Sortie £eIectiott$
PROM VARIOUS DISCOURSES AND PAPERS BY MR. ROBINSON.
"^ut of), for tbe toucb of a toanijsljcb franb,
nnit lf)C jsounb of a rioice tbat i£ £tifl."
From the oration at the unveiling of Ward's statue of
Gen. Putnam : —
The lifted veil has just disclosed to us the first entrance of
art into our places absolutely public. I cannot pass such an
event without expressing congratulations in it. No beautiful
thing comes to society without beautifying it. Good and true
works of art made free to the people must instruct and refine
the people. All such plantings yield a fruitage of culture and
liberal thought and elevated taste. The very sight of choice
things in art develops the love of the beautiful which it charms.
Our cities centralize intelligence and industry and enterprise
and wealth and enthusiasm and benevolence. Into these cen-
ters let art pour her refining influences. Let her reproduce in
color the crises of history. Let her repeat in marble and bronze
the forms and features of heroes and benefactors. Let her
teach the people the lessons which the face of a good man may
teach, recalling the good man's deeds, and the good fights
which he fought, and the good discoveries which he made, and
the sweet charities which he perfected
Let me express the hope that this day shall not complete the
memorials of our great men. Of this charity, of this consecra-
tion to art, and of this unveiling of patriotism, let us say " tran-
seant in exemplum." Connecticut's history is rich, almost beyond
a rival. A century before Bunker Hill, Connecticut produced a
hero who dared to brave the haughtiness of oppression to save
our charter from tyranny — the intrepid Wads worth. The brav-
est, gentlest soldier of the Mexican War was from Connecticut,
and rests in yonder cemetery — Col. Thomas H. Seymour. We
have not yet any memorial, in statue or column or chapel, of
the heroes of our great war for the integrity of the Union, upon
55
whose graves the flowers of Decoration Day have just withered.
In the War of the Revolution and the War of the Rebellion,
Connecticut was most justly proud of the patriotism and execu-
tive excellence of her governors, Trumbull and Buckingham.
Here in the capital of our State, by its legislative halls, now ris-
ing in white beauty, should these and other representative men,
creators and benefactors, authors, orators, inventors, artists,
and philanthropists be honored and memorialized.
From the address before the Alumni Association of the
High School: —
The high school, as included in the system of public schools,
is free. I shall not enlarge upon the importance, almost su-
preme, to our republic of free popular education. Let me sim-
ply say that in making this fontal blessing free, a nation follows
the laws of the Great Ruler himself. In the world of nature
the best blessings are free. There can be no patent in the blue
sky, nor monopoly of the pure air, and the sharpest land title
to green fields cannot prevent the whole community of rich
and poor from their enjoyment. The pure water, the warm
sunshine, the glitter of stars, the tides of ocean, the rustle of
leaves, the murmur of waves, the ripple of brooks, and the
crimson of clouds can be controlled by no human fiat, nor be
locked in by any miser's key. Such blessings in nature are too
great for any exclusive use. In the spiritual world, too, the
best gifts are open to the whole race of spiritual beings. The
true light lightens every man. The true way is for all. The
fountain of waters is at every thirsty man's right hand. And
so the nation which offers to all its people free education makes
gift of its best possibilities.
From the Historical Address at the first Legislative
Reunion of the General Assembly of Connecticut, May 6,
Two hundred and fifty years and a few days ago, on April
26, 1636, Roger Ludlow and four associates, representing Hart-
ford, Wethersfield, and Windsor (then called Newtown), Water-
town, and Dorchester, met in Hartford, as a General Court, for
the government of the first planters of Connecticut. This body
passed a law forbidding the sale of firearms to the Indians, con-
56
of New York, and Charles Lowell Thayer of Boston. By death or
resignation these one by one have passed out of the directorate
until in 1894 Mr. Robinson alone remained of their number.
The humane purpose of life insurance appealed strongly to
his sympathetic nature ; its technical and business problems and
relations enlisted his intellectual interest, and he familiarized
himself with them to a greater degree than is usual in one not
holding an executive position. He acted throughout as the legal
adviser of the company, and made a thorough and special study
of insurance law. By natural endowment, by intellectual acu-
men and broad grasp, by sympathetic interest, by study and
discipline, by great acquirements and unusual skill, he was a
strongly-equipped director. During the thirty-six years of his
service many important questions of policy and practice had the
action of the directors, and to them all he gave careful and in-
telligent attention. Most prominent, perhaps, among these
were the changes made in the basis and methods of distributing
surplus soon after his accession to the board, and the change in
the interest assumption in 1882. To the consideration of all
questions he brought with his strong powers of clear analysis
and close reasoning a quick apprehension of what was progress-
ive and developmental, and its natural accompaniment, an en-
thusiastic courage ; but he also saw clearly what was funda-
mental and vital and must be conserved as such in existing
plans and methods. While the legal point of view was habit-
ual, it was tempered and held in balance by his humane and
generous nature, and the question of essential equity was never
out of sight. To his intellectual, business, and professional val-
ues, Mr. Robinson added that personal charm which made offi-
cial association a pleasure and a privilege ; and the directors
desire to place upon record their high appreciation of the value
of his long and faithful service, their deep sense of official and
personal bereavement, and the expression of their profound
sympathy for his sorrowing household.
Resolved, That the foregoing minute be spread upon the
records of the Company and that a copy thereof be transmitted
to the family of the deceased. Attest :
Herbert H. White, Secretary.
A Resolution adopted at a Special Meeting of the Board
of Managers of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the
American Revolution, held at New Haven, April 13, 1900 : —
In the removal, by death, of our late associate, Henry Cor-
nelius Robinson, our Society suffers one of the most serious
losses which it has ever experienced.
7 49
The influence of his wise counsel and eloquent utterances
has stamped upon our organization an impress of dignity and
fidelity to its purposes to which we owe, in large measure, the
standing which we have held among the State societies of our
order. The memory of his rare personal character will ever
remain with us as a shining example of patriotic citizenship
and Christian manliness.
This feeble tribute to his memory is recorded with a pro-
found sense of personal loss which finds no utterance in words,
but finds a compensation in the reflection that our Society is
better because he was our fellow-member, and that the world
is better because he lived in it.
At a meeting of the Board of Directors of The New
York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, held
pursuant to legal notice at the office of the company in the
city of New York, on Saturday, March 10, 1900, the follow-
ing minute was adopted : —
" With the deepest regret this Board minutes the death of
Hon. Henry C. Robinson, our late associate, who died on Feb-
ruary 14, 1900. Elected a Director of the Hartford and New
Haven Railroad Company in 1865, he served as a Director of
that compan}?- until its consolidation with this Company in 1872,
and thereafter continuously as a member of this Board. A
man of stalwart integrity, broad culture, gifted with rare ora-
torical ability and intellectual vigor, he brought honesty, cour-
age, and wisdom to all his duties. He has served as a member
of all the important committees appointed by the Board, and
has long been identified with the activity, progress, and success
of this Company. His long service, experience, and ability,
made him a conspicuous member of this Board, and his enthu-
siastic devotion to the interests and usefulness of the Company
have been of inestimable value. Endowed with the most
charming social qualities and gifted with brilliant conversa-
tional powers, he was always welcome at our meetings. We
shall miss his genial courtesy not less than his sound advice.
This corporation, to whose development he gave the benefit of
his ripe experience, his great knowledge of men and affairs, and
his loyal service, has lost a most valuable officer.
" The Board directs that this minute be entered upon its
records and a certified copy thereof be forwarded to his imme-
diate family."
A true copy from the records. Attest :
Wm. D. Bishop, Secretary.
50
€{)e pipe anti tfje p^alterp mafee £toeet meloop; but
a pleasant tongue i$ afcotoe tfjem cotf),
Mr. Robinson's unremitting industry, well known to all
who were familiar with his habits of study and work, is
attested by the number and diversity of discourses, essays,
lectures, reviews, and other papers, which, in addition to
his professional work, he was called or moved to prepare,
most of which were printed in the newspapers, or in
periodicals, or in pamphlets. In all this extra-professional
labor, not only his industry, but the fruitfulness of his
mind, the versatility of his intellectual gifts, and the breadth
of his thoughts and sympathies were also manifested. He
was deeply interested in all that pertains to human culture
and welfare, and his voice and pen were freely employed
for the elucidation and advocacy of those things which
make for the illumination and improvement of human life.
The range of topics which, from time to time, he discussed
was a wide one, and his treatment of the subjects which
engaged his attention was always intelligent and luminous.
Whether he spoke or wrote, or whether his subject was
legal, political, historical, religious, literary, educational,
civic, or artistic in its nature, his discourse or essay was
marked by careful study, original thought, apt illustration,
and a peculiarly felicitous and often eloquent form of
expression. His strictly extemporaneous talks were always
suggestive and often brilliant. He had, as his mother
before him also had, the poetic temperament, and could, and
did, on occasion, write graceful verse. Under the title of
" Hartford Authors," he wrote, many years ago, a series of
papers which appeared in one of the city newspapers, and
were marked by a distinct literary discrimination and del-
icacy. When Mr. Dudley Buck's " Forty-sixth Psalm" was
51
first produced here, in his native town, the most appreciative
review of it came from Mr. Robinson's pen. When Parepa
sang here in oratorio, his " Few Thoughts about Parepa,"
published in the Courant, were recognized by many as the
thoughts which had arisen in their minds, but which they
could not utter. When, later, Nilsson came, he rendered a
similar service. His obituary notices of prominent persons,
published from time to time in our city papers, were not
only tender tributes of friendship and affection, but admi-
rable specimens of fine character-portraiture. He could find
time to write an elaborate review of a new collection of
hymns and music, or a " Word about the Lobby," or a criti-
cism of the Life of Charlotte Bronte, or an essay on Fish
Culture, or a paper on " The Significance of Dome and
Tower," or a review of " Doctor Bushnell on Progress," or
an article on the " Reduction of Railway Fares and
Freights," or a series of sparkling letters to the New Haven
Palladium. One of the best of his earlier diversions was a
lecture in the old Hartford Seminary course on, " Art as a
Flower " ; and another thoughtful and scholarly discourse
on a kindred subject was delivered by him before the
Hartford Art Association.
Meanwhile his political speeches and writings were
frequent. When Mr. Capron, of beloved memory, was
taken from this scene of his most valuable services as Prin-
cipal of the High School, Mr. Robinson delivered an
address which deeply moved all hearts, and revealed him
to Hartford people as their eloquent orator. His frequent
addresses at the High School, on different occasions, are
well remembered. His oration on the unveiling of Ward's
statue of Putnam, and his later and more elaborate oration
at the dedication of the monument to Putnam, were every-
where applauded as singularly forcible, thoughtful, and
graceful works of genuine eloquence.
The pages of the New Englander were enriched by his
brilliant review of Arnold's " Light of Asia," by his argu-
ment for a " Liberal Construction of Creeds," drawn from
the usage of law, and by other articles as well.
Many still remember his noble address on the death of
52
President Garfield, spoken in the Second Church of Hart-
ford, and that on Ltither, spoken in the Park Church.
His lectures, earlier and later, before the Law School in
New Haven, and those before the Kent Club in the
same city, were received with unusual favor.
His Decoration Day orations, at Hartford, at South
Manchester, and at Rockville, and his oration on Robert
Burns, are comparatively fresh in the remembrance of our
citizens, and are cherished with equal gratitude and pride.
At the Legislative Reunion, 1 886, he was the orator of
the day, and his historical address on that occasion was
described as "a compendium of colonial and state legis-
lative history."
At the General Conference of Congregational Churches
at Norwalk, 1892, his address on " What shall We Do with
the First Day of the Week " was a most timely and sug-
gestive discussion of the " Sunday Question." Mention
may be made of his address on " Medicine and Law " at the
centennial celebration of the Hartford Medical Societ}^ ; of
his eulogy on General Grant ; of his discourse on Christian
Unity, at the Memorial Church in Springfield ; of his talk
to the Hartford ministers on the " Temperance Question as
Viewed from a Legal Standpoint " ; of his lecture in the
Y. M. C. A. course on " Representative Government " ; of
his Letter to the Courant on " Towns and Representation " ;
and of his article in the Yale Law Journal in favor of " Con-
stitutional Reform in Connecticut." Many important
papers of his are not even mentioned here. His strictly
political speeches are not noticed, nor the frequent talks on
various subjects, which he freely gave at request at
banquets, conferences, and festival occasions, nor the many
delightful papers which he read, from time to time, at dif-
ferent clubs.
The purpose of this sketch is simply to indicate how
versatile were his gifts, how broad was his culture, how
catholic were his intellectual and moral sympathies, and
how freely and generously he poured out from the treasures
of his fruitful mind things of delight and refreshment for
his fellowmen. This sort of work, enough for most men,
53
seemed to be a sort of recreation with him, and yet it all
came out, naturally enough, from the wide range of his
professional studies and interests. During his last illness he
told the writer how he had meditated and purposed to write
out a paper for the comparison and estimation of Drs.
Horace Bushnell and Samuel Harris, whom he regarded as
the two greatest theologians of our country in recent times.
In another conversation he spoke at length and most inter-
estingly of " The Old Jeffersonians " of Hartford, naming
and describing many of them, and speaking fondly of " the
last, but not the least of them," Mr. Alfred E. Burr, and
saying that he would like to write an article about them.
One of the last things which he wrote, and the last that was
printed was a brief, tender note to the son of Mr. Burr, in
which he expressed his regret that he was unable to pay the
tribute to his old friend which it was in his heart to do.
The last note which he penned or dictated was a brief
message, unique and precious, to his old friend and Pastor.
From the mass of miscellaneous discourses, essays, and
other papers by Mr. Robinson which fortunately have been
preserved, a few selections have been made, and are herein
appended, as fairly showing, perhaps, the quality of his
thought, and the diverse phases of his meditations and
expressions of truth. No attempt has been made to repro-
duce his forensic speeches, or even to present any illustra-
tions of them. Nor has it seemed wise to dismember his
more solid and substantial historical papers and addresses,
for the sake of taking fragments from them.
In justice to his comprehensive grasp of constitutional
and political principles, to his powers of argumentation, to
his lore as a scholar, and to his best literary gifts, it should
be said that quite a different selection might have been
made, which would have seemed not less suggestive and
instructive than that which has been made. But such a
selection must of necessity have been far more extensive
and less varied than was deemed suitable for the purposes
of this memorial.
Edwin P. Parker.
54
FROM VARIOUS DISCOURSES AND PAPERS BY MR. ROBINSON.
"^ut ol), for tftc toucb of a toanisfocb foano,
Knb (be ?ounD of a tioice tfrat \$ jstin."
From the oration at the unveiling of Ward's statue of
Gen. Putnam : —
The lifted veil has just disclosed to us the first entrance of
art into our places absolutely public. I cannot pass such an
event without expressing congratulations in it. No beautiful
thing comes to society without beautifying it. Good and true
works of art made free to the people must instruct and refine
the people. All such plantings yield a fruitage of culture and
liberal thought and elevated taste. The very sight of choice
things in art develops the love of the beautiful which it charms.
Our cities centralize intelligence and industry and enterprise
and wealth and enthusiasm and benevolence. Into these cen-
ters let art pour her refining influences. Let her reproduce in
color the crises of history. Let her repeat in marble and bronze
the forms and features of heroes and benefactors. Let her
teach the people the lessons which the face of a good man may
teach, recalling the good man's deeds, and the good fights
which he fought, and the good discoveries which he made, and
the sweet charities which he perfected
Let me express the hope that this day shall not complete the
memorials of our great men. Of this charity, of this consecra-
tion to art, and of this unveiling of patriotism, let us say " tran-
seant in exemplum" Connecticut's history is rich, almost beyond
a rival. A century before Bunker Hill, Connecticut produced a
hero who dared to brave the haughtiness of oppression to save
our charter from tyranny — the intrepid Wadsworth. The brav-
est, gentlest soldier of the Mexican War was from Connecticut,
and rests in yonder cemetery — Col. Thomas H. Seymour. We
have not yet any memorial, in statue or column or chapel, of
the heroes of our great war for the integrity of the Union, upon
55
whose graves the flowers of Decoration Day have just withered.
In the War of the Revolution and the War of the Rebellion,
Connecticut was most justly proud of the patriotism and execu-
tive excellence of her governors, Trumbull and Buckingham.
Here in the capital of our State, by its legislative halls, now ris-
ing in white beauty, should these and other representative men,
creators and benefactors, authors, orators, inventors, artists,
and philanthropists be honored and memorialized.
From the address before the Alumni Association of the
High School : —
The high school, as included in the system of public schools,
is free. I shall not enlarge upon the importance, almost su-
preme, to our republic of free popular education. Let me sim-
ply say that in making this fontal blessing free, a nation follows
the laws of the Great Ruler himself. In the world of nature
the best blessings are free. There can be no patent in the blue
sky, nor monopoly of the pure air, and the sharpest land title
to green fields cannot prevent the whole community of rich
and poor from their enjoyment. The pure water, the warm
sunshine, the glitter of stars, the tides of ocean, the rustle of
leaves, the murmur of waves, the ripple of brooks, and the
crimson of clouds can be controlled by no human fiat, nor be
locked in by any miser's key. Such blessings in nature are too
great for any exclusive use. In the spiritual world, too, the
best gifts are open to the whole race of spiritual beings. The
true light lightens every man. The true way is for all. The
fountain of waters is at every thirsty man's right hand. And
so the nation which offers to all its people free education makes
gift of its best possibilities.
From the Historical Address at the first Legislative
Reunion of the General Assembly of Connecticut, May 6,
Two hundred and fifty years and a few days ago, on April
26, 1636, Roger Ludlow and four associates, representing Hart-
ford, Wethersfield, and Windsor (then called Newtown), Water-
town, and Dorchester, met in Hartford, as a General Court, for
the government of the first planters of Connecticut. This body
passed a law forbidding the sale of firearms to the Indians, con-
56
demned Henry Stiles for trading a " peece " for corn, ordered
him to " regaine the saide peece from the saide Indians in a
faire and legall waye or els this Corte will take it into further
consideracon ; " selected and qualified a constable for each of
the three settlements, made orders relative to " divers strange
swine," and ratified the formation of the earliest church in this
valley.
In this little gathering was the beginning of Connecticut's
legislature and court. By what method of appointment the
magistrates, who constituted this court, arrived at their office, it
is not certain ; but of the fact that they acted with the consent
if not by the express choice, of the planters, there can be no
doubt.
One year later, May i, 1637, when the court, which had held
several intermediate sessions, was convened to consider the im-
portant subject of a war with the Pequots, the several towns
sent their committees to participate with the magistrates in the
counsels of the Assembly. There is somewhere in the mount-
ain ridge that divides the watersheds, whose rainfall ultimately
reaches northerly to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and southerly to
Long Island Sound, a single spring, farthest away of all which
feed the latter sea ; perhaps no investigation has yet traced it,
but it is there, and if we could to-day go to it, taste it, analyze
it, and bathe in it, we should find that it is of the same pure
stream which, for uncounted centuries, through four hundred
miles of mountain and meadow, in waterfall, cascade, ripple,
and lake, has made the beautiful river in whose baptismal
waters our commonwealth found its name. And so the legisla-
tive gatherings of our State for two and a half centuries find
their type in this gathering of 1637. It was a supreme, law-
making body, representing the people and the towns of the col-
ony. A year later the Rev. Thomas Hooker, in his discourse
before the General Court, at Hartford, May 31, 1638, declared
for doctrine : " That the choice of public magistrates belongs
unto the people by God's own allowance," and " that they who
have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their
power also to set the bounds and limitations of the power and
place unto which they call them," and for reasons of this doc-
trine he urged, first, " Because the foundation of authority is
laid firstly in the free consent of the people ; " second, " Because
of a free choice the hearts of the people will be more inclined
8 57
to the love of the persons chosen and more ready to yield
obedience."
His lesson of exhortation was, " To persuade us, as God has
given us liberty, to take it."
One year later, on the 14th of January, 1639, all the free
planters of the colony convened at Hartford and prepared the
first American constitution, and it may fairly be called the first
written constitution of history which was adopted by a people.
We can do no less than pause a moment and do homage to this
great historical event. We honor the limitations upon despot-
ism which were written on the twelve tables ; the repressions
of monarchial power in magna charta, in the bill of rights, and
in that whole undefinable creation, as invisible and intangible
as the atmosphere, but, like it, full of oxygen and electricity,
which we call the British constitution. But in this, our Con-
necticut constitution, we find no limitations upon monarchy, for
monarchy is unrecognized ; the limitations are upon the legis-
lature, the courts, and the executive. It is pure democracy
acting through representatives and imposing organic limita-
tions. Even the suffrage qualification of church membership,
which was required by our older sister colony of Massachusetts,
was omitted. Six hundred years before, the head of the Christian
church had said that he had "power to depose emperors, and
absolve the subjects of wicked princes from their allegiance."
The "grand monarch " of France declared, "I am the State."
The civilizations of the Orient had been the history of despo-
tism and monarchy and nobilities. Law was the rule of civil
conduct, made by the supreme power, commanding what was
right and forbidding what was wrong ; but the supreme power
had been an individual. The Mosaic code was a long string of
" Thou shalts," and a longer string of " Thou shalt nots." The
Roman Senate was the legislature and the Roman Senators
were nobles. If a plebiscite made a new law, it was the voice
of a mob in the comitia. Here, in a New England wilderness,
in the heart of winter, a few pilgrims of the Pilgrims, alive to
the inspirations of the common law and of the British constitu-
tion, so full of Christianity that they felt the great throb of its
heart of human brotherhood, and so full of Judaism that they
believed themselves in some special sense the people of God,
made a written constitution to be a supreme and organic law
for their State.
58
Two hundred and fifty years have passed, and despotism is
hiding in corners, while constitutional law is flooding the world
with its light and bathing it in its peace.
From an address on Luther :
This man stands, in my thoughts, as a great emancipator of
his race. It is difficult for us of to-day, girt with freedom as by
an atmosphere, and protected by the majesties of constitutional
law, to appreciate, even when we read of them, the chains and
oppressions of that other day, tied upon human hands and
human minds and human hearts. The assumptions of imperial
princes and imperial pontiffs were unlimited, and were only
endurable because of their jealousies of each other. The eman-
cipating movement, of which Luther was the hero, was fol-
lowed by others in England where a king went to the scaffold,
and in France where liberty ran riot, until, at the extreme west,
and over unknown seas, a purer free state was founded, to be
forever separate from ecclesiastical government. . . . It is
a narrow vision, indeed, which limits this influence of Luther,
as a moral reformer, to the new churches. The old church felt
it deeply, and confessed it. The old church listened to Luther's
outcries for the decencies, and admitted their justice. His
ecclesiastical and doctrinal variations from the old standards of
tradition and decree were heresies to be stamped out with fire
and sword, but his demands for a purer life found welcome.
But thirty-five years after the Diet of Worms, a Roman pontiff, in
his first bull upon taking his sacred office, said : " We do prom-
ise and swear to make it our first care that the reform of the
universal church and of the Roman court be at once entered
upon."
Where was the great personal power of this man ?
Let me give but one of the many answers. It was because
he was in all respects a man. He was full to the brim of human
nature. Man is naturally patriotic, because he is born into gov-
ernment, and it is so within the universal consciousness. Luther
was a patriot of patriots. Dominion of Germany by Italy or
Spain or France was to him intolerable. Man is naturally do-
mestic, he is born into the family. Luther was intensely domes-
tic, and sang the sweetest songs of home. Man is naturally
religious, for he is born with a spiritual and trustful nature.
Luther carried his reverence and obedience to the throne of the
59
Infinite, and walked under His shadow in the burning sun, and
in His light by night, and his courage and faith and enthusi-
asm and sociality and love of music were manly. Luther's
grandeur is in his being a great, rough, noble specimen of
humanity.
From an article in New Engla?ider, on " Assent to
Creeds" :
There have always been two methods of construing things
written or spoken, be they constitutions, charters, public stat-
utes, wills, contracts, symbols, creeds, or statements. One
method is broad, catholic, liberal. It reaches the underlying
principles of the instrument. It notes relations. It does not
destroy the dial, because the shadows which were written on
its west side in the morning are missing at noon, and have gone
over to the east in the afternoon. It notes fallibility in every-
thing human, and sees that all human utterances are more or
less imbued with inconsistency, want of harmony, and imper-
fection. But it still trusts human nature and human achieve-
ment, and the Divine inspirations in man. It sees spots on the
sun, but continues to plant, relying upon the source of heat,
and to open its eyes for vision, relying upon the source of light.
The other method is strict, narrow, literal, petty, sticks
always in the bark, yellows in dust, and glories in punctuation
and syntax. It sees things only by the light which struggles in
through a single window. Universal light makes it blind. At
night its torch must still be a tallow dip. Electricity would be
impious.
The former method contemplates systems, is comparative,
analogical, feels outward facts and forces of which all things
are more or less resultants. To it the moon is a satellite of a
moving planet, that planet a single member of a solar system,
and that system an integral part of a universe, each with rela-
tions and changing relations to the rest.
To the other method the moon is ever only itself, a cold,
blackened, worn out, uninhabitable lump of matter, answerable
only to some laws of chemistry and philosophy, which are sup-
posed to be unchangeable. But the moon itself is too far away
for the latter method. While the former finds daily and nightly
use for the telescope, the eye of the latter is always at the
microscope.
60
The broad physician studies the whole physical system of
man and searches the universe for analogies, and treats his
patients constitutionally ; the narrow one feeds his own hobby ;
sees in each patient a disordered liver, if that is his specialty,
and indulges only in local treatment. The strict construction-
ist in our Lord's time swore by the temple and said his oath was
nothing ; but bowed in reverence before his oath if he had
only sworn by the gold within it. Shylock was a strict con-
structionist, and Portia gave his philosophy homoeopathic treat-
ment by fighting the fire of his strict construction with the fire
of her own. The difference was that Shylock believed in his
strict method of construction, while Portia redeemed hers by
the broad charity and decency which inspired it. The Phari-
sees were strict constructionists, they were scrupulously partic-
ular to tithe cheap herbs, and were immaculate in their vest-
ments. And, whoever else, in the progress of the world's his-
tory, have disappeared through an indefinite failure of issue,
these strict constructionists have never lacked for lineal de-
scendants in the governments, and churches, and theological
schools of the world.
The argument of this article claims :
i. That a liberal construction of instruments is wiser and
better than a strict one.
2. That creeds and symbols afford no exception to this rule.
3. That reasonable liberty of construction should be allowed
to the undertaker of a trust.
(And incidentally) 4. That the limitation of the use of
property to the progagation of unalterable opinion is an offen-
sive form of entail and against public policy.
From an address at the Memorial Church, Springfield,
Mass., December, 1888:
It is a time of agitation, but agitation means life. It is a day
of sincerity ; the messages are direct and practical. It is a day
of decency ; the barbarities which have clung to historic Chris-
tianity have been buried in a soundless sea.
It is a day of search for pure truth. Christian men, simple
men and scholars alike, are going back to the shores of Galilee,
to find the words of absolute truth and the life of absolute
holiness. They are thirsting to find the pure waters of life at
the fountain.
61
It is the day of toleration and consideration. Ancient
Oxford, home of much learning and patriotism, home, too, of
some bigotry and subservience to authority, delivers her
highest degree to James Martineau. The gates of the uni-
versities have swung open to dissenters.
The revival of learning and architecture three centuries
ago was closely associated with a reformation in religion which
created a new church and purified an old one. The intense
zeal of science to-day has improved and quickened the religious
world into a new devotion to truth, into new tolerations, and
into purer worship of the one God and Father, Creator of all
things visible and invisible, ruling material nature, and, as
well his children, the sons of men in social life, in organized
government, and in the renewal and inspiration of their spirit-
ual nature, by the majestic girdings and ongoings of supreme
law. And in discovering our own growth and progress, in
seeing that yesterday's wisdom is so often to-day's folly, man-
kind is learning modesty and reverence. Few men now fancy
that their garments inclose infallibility, or that their fathers'
did. The large-minded, great-souled men hesitate at attempts
to measure the being of the Infinite with their petty calipers.
In a life where we can know only in part, we learn the immense
value of probabilities and working hypotheses. The verities
which may be demonstrated by mathematical science or math-
ematical logic are few. Science has sought for centuries for a
standard of measurement. It has asked the eternal rocks for
assistance, has appealed to the law of gravity in the swing of
the pendulum, has summoned frost and fire to give a possible
unbroken temperature, has called on the densities of the ores,
has invoked the vibrations of light, and to-day, after expend-
itures most lavish, and fret of mind most subtle, science blushes
to tell us that she cannot give us a perfect yard-stick. And
shall we ask for demonstrations of things invisible ? Demon-
strations are not the law of our being. The day sky is blue,
but it is not cloudless.
And while the sincere Christian thinker has no hesitation in
admitting that there are clouds and shadows in the day, he yet
rejoices in the sun in its course, for when he goes away from
the region which sustains and guides and controls him, he goes
out into night. Our blessed religion answers the tremendous
inquiries which have always thrilled humanity. Is there a first
62
cause ? Christianity points to the eternal Creator. What is
his being ? A loving father. What of my own weakness and
wrong ? He wants to forgive them. What means the
grave ? Behold the empty tomb of Joseph, and hear of the
mansions in the Father's house. What of history's long story
of tyranny and crime ? Every son of man is a son of God, and
the hairs of his head are numbered. What of the emptiness of
circumstance and power ? The Son of Man came to minister.
What of the struggles and defeats and the injustices and
inequalities of this troubled world ? Out of them comes char-
acter, manly faith the corner-stone of the temple, its crowning
arch built into a keystone of love, which fills a world of sorrow
with music, and makes the dry land sweet with the lily of the
valley. Into the service of our inspired and inspiring religion,
here in this goodly spot, we welcome this minister of good
things.
From the Oration on Burns :
It is the poets who move the world's thought. The con-
querors make territorial lines, preserve and confuse races, and
fill the largest pages in the histories. The statesmen build
governments, and frame constitutions and laws. The scholars
select and save from the wreck of time the fittest of human
efforts. The speculative philosophers work away at the
insoluble problems which constantly roll back upon them, like
Sisyphus' stone, and their lectures and treatises engage the
attention of a select few, to their improvement chiefly by way of
intellectual gymnastics. But the poets, and they do not all write
in rhyme, see the invisibles, which are the realities, and report
them to our souls. They sing the songs of our noblest nature ;
they deal with the themes which in individual and social and
organized life are the great and eternal things ; their methods
are unhampered by chop logic, they move by intuitions ; they
are limited by no narrow curtains of " pure reason," so-called,
they scan and traverse the boundless realm of imagination ;
they wait not at the finite, they compass the infinite ; they
measure not with the limited span of fingers and hands, they
take in the spaces open to human vision with the eye of
body and the eye of soul ; they walk not with feet in the dusty
roads, they fly with wings in the upper air.
When the human mind is shut up in the conclusions of
63
demonstration, it is shut into a prison. It is at its best when it
is aflame with enthusiasm and inspired with imagination.
Then it makes report, not from tables of logarithms and verbal
results drawn from major and minor premises of statement ;
but it draws down, as light from the sun, flashes of intuitive
truth, and sounds into human ears the universal things which
the past of human experience suggests and the future of human
development assures.
I know of nothing in the history of our western Christian
civilization which is more disgraceful to it than its treatment
of the Jews. For centuries the Christian nations denied them
citizenship, denied them even a domicile, denied them domestic
peace, hung badges of dishonor upon their persons, and hunted
them like wild beasts to the hills. Even enlightened England,
not so enlightened then, drove them out and forbade them to
touch her borders. Oliver Cromwell, the greatest of England's
rulers, partially wiped out the disgrace. And now, after
having thrown upon the Semitic people every political oppres-
sion and every social obloquy open to ingenuity for centuries,
and just as the Christian world has come into decency in the
matter, a revival of the old hate is agitated. And what is this
race that is treated to such persecution ? The toughest, most
sinewy, most elastic race in history. Centuries of infamous
oppression have not chilled their manhood, and now, after all
these ages of persecution, the fomenters of this strife are
enraged because, they say, a race of seven millions of people is
usurping positions of influence and power. What a tribute to
their royalty these bitter pens are unconsciously making !
And what has this race done for humanity ? Look at its great-
ness. Its sacred literature is held by the Christian world in
reverence, and by much of it even in idolatry. Think of its
long roll of law-givers and leaders, of poets, prophets, and
philanthropists, its service for learning and scholarship and
literature and art.
The men who lift up the lowly, who exalt the valleys, who
scatter broadcast the blessings of education and health and
music and flowers and green trees and babbling brooks and
the story of the stars and the sweet comforts of home and the
enlightenment of a pure and free press, who emphasize man's
right to life and liberty and self-government, who call us to
64
the Heavenly Father, who substitute service for attention
and glory, peace for war, love for selfishness, law for imperial
decree, the uplift of the many for the supremacy of the few,
democracy for despotism, are the great men, for they are the
men of humanity, the universal men.
From the Eulogy of General Grant : —
It is a great thing to have lost such a man ; it is much
greater to have had such a man to lose. He was a child of the
people, he was a type of the people, and the hearts of the peo-
ple are keeping sad time to the funeral march of twenty thou-
sand soldiers. The nation pauses in its activities. The reaper
and the loom are at rest, and even the money-changers have
locked their vaults. Upon the billows of every sea and in the
repose of every harbor drooping halliards have compelled the
flags of all nations to tell a story of death. The courts of
Europe and kings' houses in the Orient wear symbols of sor-
row. The gates of the great Abbey have swung open, and in
the company of buried soldiers and statesmen and poets and
kings the chief singers and organists and orators have ex-
pressed England's unaffected grief. Millions of moistened eyes
are turned to the new tomb upon the Hudson.
Is it all for the sword which he wore to victory? Is it that
he planned campaigns with the skill of Csesar, waited with the
wisdom of Scipio, pounded with the sledge-hammer of Welling-
ton, charged with the thunderbolts of Napoleon ? Is it that
he surveyed the whole vast field, friends and enemies, in for-
tresses, camps, and battle-lines, with the eye of an eagle in the
sky ? Is it that military success never betrayed him into care-
lessness, nor repulse led him into discouragement ? Is it that
while some of his associates and antagonists were chivalrous,
some prudent, some tenacious, some brilliant, he was all of
these ? Man has always admired and idolized the martial
heroes. Dominion, power, civilizations, have moved on in the
track of the conquerors, and have crowned them. But there
have been heroes and heroes. Heroes there have been whose
genius waited as a slave upon the lust of power, and heroes
who bowed in their service only to the nobilities, patriotism,
freedom, and righteousness. Admiration, wonder, and subser-
vience are attendants upon the obsequies of the former ; around
the graves of the latter are the hush of devotion, the tears of
9 65
gratitude, the tides of love, and the exultation of human broth-
erhood.
These heroes, with supreme purpose, unshaken by tempta-
tion, to bless man and to obey God, are the flowers and types
of humanity in its great success. The genius of our hero has
already had much discriminating eulogy — nothing has yet been
said finer than the words of his tent comrade of so many cam-
paigns : " He was the manliest man." Such a character is an
inspiration to the race. For the world grows truest and best,
not in its books, but in its characters. We learn in them what
man can be. By what our hero was, and even more by what
he was not, he has put high honors upon human nature. A
soldier who sought not paeans or pageants, a statesman who
yielded no single span to the tugs of injustice and the mad
thunders of the hour. Unskilled in the ways of political life,
untrained in the philosophies of statesmanship, he yet dared to
lift that strong arm, and that voice which was often so mightily
silent, to scatter the tempest which urged the inflation bill,
when politicians and statesmen retired to their chambers. For
the Indian, so many times a victim of fraud and bad faith, he
had counsels and measures of protection and defense. When
an un-American insanity raged and chafed against an Oriental
race, and political leader after political leader bowed before it,
his lips, so often closed, opened to condemn it. When a Presi-
dent of the United States asked him, it is said commanded him,
to stain his soldierly honor, his quick response of firm refusal
and the unconcealed hilt of his invincible sword assured the
mistaken executive that he was endeavoring to command the
impossible. Higher than all men, higher than the President,
yes, even than himself, were those invisible forces of right and
truth and honor and patriotism, whose power to him was as ex-
acting as are the attractions of the heavenly bodies to the sea.
And like the other great leaders, like Washington and Caesar,
Cromwell and Napoleon, Mahomet and Joan of Arc, he believed
with more than an intellectual assent, even with the belief of
his whole nature, in an individual force behind all things, visi-
ble and invisible, in whose guidance his own career was held.
Napoleon called it fate. Grant saw in it an infinite personal
God, whom he reverently worshiped.
And what demonstrations has our history given of the pos-
sible purity of free government by the lives of two men ? Once
66
our country, delivered from colonial dependence, was ushered
into a course of national history, and its warrior leader forbore
to be a conqueror or to build up a throne for a family. And
then the nation was rent by disunion and rebellion, and its life
hung in the issues, long- contested, of war vast beyond prece-
dent, and its warrior-deliverer laid aside his sword and com-
pelled the restoration of peace and industry. Can records,
other than the pages of our history, show two such soldier-
patriots as Washington and Grant ? They teach us that man
is greater than thrones, than traditions, than institutions ; and
this is democracy.
Under God, Grant saved a nation by the victories of war ;
saved it from disunion, discord, broken life, and a future of
endless jealousy and battle ; saved it for freedom ; saved it for
peace. He believed in peace. His wise interventions, coming
like a gospel from the west, scattered the clouds of war that
overhung the lands of China and Japan. He believed in his
country. He was an American in every atom of his being
and in every throb of his heart. Alive to the good things in
other people's, he loved his own matchless land more than the
rest.
And, as if his mission was not fulfilled when he laid aside
his stars, nor when he surrendered the executive chair, nor
when he called forth in his trip around the world such honors
from prince and peasant as had never been yielded to an Amer-
ican, in these last days of suffering and sickness, while he has
fought his fight against pain and weariness, with no word of
complaint nor sigh of selfishness, his heart has gone out, like
the blessing of a sunset, to the whole people whom he loved
and saved. It has been like the holy words of benediction,
spoken again and again by the prophet of Patmos in the last
days of his century life. He must be deaf, indeed, — deaf as
the granite ledge, which hears not the everlasting anthem of
the billows which beat upon it, — who hears no command to
national peace and love in those dying messages spoken to the
battalions who called him chief and to the battalions who called
him foe.
When his last will and testament is offered to the courts of
law, it may dispose of few acres, few bonds and shares, little
which political economy calls wealth, but to every American
he bequeathed a legacy better than lands or jewels, as he
67
breathed out upon them from his chamber of death his
moritumus saluto.
Right life ! And in the hour when life is ending
With mind set fast and truthful piety,
Drawing still breath beneath calm brows unbending
In happy peace that faithful one doth die.
From the Decoration Day address, at Hartford, 1885 : —
For seventeen years the members of the Grand Army of the
Republic have added new charms to these hours, already charm-
ing in the calendar of nature, by setting- them apart for a sac-
rament of soldierly love. Seventeen years ago, with strong
arms and in the full vigor of manhood, to the music which then
seemed an echo from yesterday's battlefields, in long lines, you
bore to these sacred acres bunches- and wreaths and crowns of
spring flowers to ninety-three graves. To-day, with closer
ranks and fewer battalions, and with many a ripple of silver
locks below your caps, you are decorating the mounds of four
hundred and eighteen graves.
By these rites of beauty which you have established, all the
more impressive because they are expressed in no mystic words,
but only in the language of love, and wear no vestments but
the wreaths of Nature, you have been educating the youth of
our land in lessons most sweet and sacred. For what is indi-
vidual or social life without sentiment ? Without it let us go to
the caves. If there is nothing for us here but to chase a dollar
in mines and shops and stores and fields, with no thought of the
unmaterial joys of home and country, then is your march to-day
a waste of muscle, and the incense of these roses is a mockery.
But man is man, and not alone an animal, hungering and thirst-
ing and sleeping. He is born into the family and into society ;
his are all the manifold possibilities of development in social
life. As well say that a man's hands and feet have no use, as
to say that his sentiments and affections and virtues are use-
less. Your memorial marches and songs and flower chaplets
are teaching the people lessons of love and reverence for the
martyrs, and of devotion to the nation which they died to save.
The web of the stars and stripes is but a creature of the
shuttle, and the old bell in the tower of Independence Hall
only broke the atmosphere into certain vibrations, but the col-
68
ors of the one will last as long as the hues of nature, and the
music of the other is as undying as the music of the spheres.
And it is here, noble veterans, survivors of this brave band
of heroes, that you have strange power above the power of
other men. It is the consummate power of tragedy. From
these graves which you are honoring, and from your own
graves which will be honored to-morrow, voices are speaking
and will speak, which must find a hearing ; for the struggles
and sufferings of man are universal in their sway, and so, as
tragedy is the ultimate of struggle and suffering, its power over
human hearts is universal and measureless. The leaves which
are stained with blood are the text-books of human life.
Veterans, to-day we bow before you in gratitude ; with you
we bend before these graves in reverence and love. Yonder
sleeps one whose burial wrote a long page of life to many of
us. We had witnessed military funerals before, but his was
the first burial of real war, — a noble soldier, slain by the red
hand of treason and the first-fruits of the patriot martyrs, to be
laid to sleep in these sacred fields. He fell on the deck of the
Freeborn in the last of June, 1861. A few days before the coun-
try was in tears by the dead body of the young and heroic The-
odore Winthrop. He was carried to the New Haven cemetery
on the same howitzer on which he leaned a few weeks before on
his way to the front, and followed by soldiers and friends, and by
the students of the old Yale which he had loved and honored.
It was the 3d day of July when yonder sod was broken to re-
ceive the body of Captain Ward. It had lain in state in the old
capitol, and thence was brought to this sacred resting-place.
How the hearts of this community were thrilled and their eyes
glistened as that body, wounded to death for our country, was
borne through the streets wrapped in red, white, and blue.
The minute-guns, the tolling bells, the muffled drums, the re-
versed arms, the orchestral dead march, the body-guard of ma-
rines, the long battalions of soldiers in escort, some of them our
home companies and some of them volunteers waiting for the
field, the burst of sympathy, the resolve of patriotism and holy
vengeance girding all, like a uniform, the halo-crown of mar-
tyrdom hovering, as a presence almost visible, above the dead,
made a scene altogether strange, and lifted the curtain upon
69
the realities of war, the wickedness of rebellion, and the beauty
of sacrifice. How little did we then know that a half million
more of noble lives must be given to establish peace upon right-
eousness ! Not all that precious dust was to be gathered, like
his, to its final rest in the outburst of sympathy from loving
friends, but whether at home or on the bloody field, in the
shadow of night and by the wearied hands of comrades, or under
the waters of the deep, the bodies of those martyrs shall sleep
forever in the benedictions of patriotism and in the guardian-
ship of angels.
Your wreaths of flowers, like the sacred dust they honor,
will be lost in the atoms of nature, but the light from these
graves will shine as long as the stars shall burn in the belt of
Orion.
From a Speech delivered at a New York Yale Alumni
Banquet :
When we drop our knives and forks we turn from things
material to things invisible. And after all, in spite of the ma-
terialist, the invisibles are our largest realities. First in order
we drink to Alma Mater, but our eyes may not find her shelter-
ing arms, and her fostering bosom we cannot touch. And then
we drink again to this sentiment to which you have asked me
to respond, the Yale Spirit. Where is the camera which shall
shadow a likeness of the Yale Spirit, and where is the brush
and what are the pigments which shall paint its portrait ?
How and where shall we find it ? We may go to the old fence
and whittle its fibers, and we are taught again the old lesson
that no golden eggs are discovered by dissecting the goose.
We go to Chapel, sit 'neath the elms, walk around the relics of
the old Brick Row, but neither mensuration, nor chemistry, nor
optics will reward our search. We watch the blue blades of the
crew, as they dip into the waves and rise to the sunlight with the
accuracy of the pendulum and the power of the driving-wheel ;
we look at the blue stockings and blue " Y "s on the breasts of
the boys, as the team trots down the field ; we see the flutter
of a thousand blue flags, and hear the rifle crack of a thousand
'rahs, and the sonorous choruses of Brek-ke-ke-kex Ko-ax-ko-ax
and the oceanic roar of ten thousand Ya-a-les, as the ball sails
through the goal post winging its flight to victory ; but all these
things material and sensational report to us that until we have
70
added the invisible sentiments to the sensations we cannot find
the Yale Spirit. Electricity is not locked in the dynamo — the
dynamo only sets free the subtle and invisible power. The
spirit of '76 is not in the Bunker Hill monument, nor in the
bronze statues of Washington and Putnam, but in the patriot-
ism and self-sacrifice of the men who fought by the rail fence
with Putnam, or crossed the Delaware, bled and starved at
Valley Forge, and triumphed at Yorktown with Washington.
Where and what then is the Yale Spirit ? Pick up the seal
of dear old Alma Mater and read its legend, Lux et Veritas. In
the invisible sentiments which these words enshrine, the Yale
Spirit has its inmost home.
Light ! At daybreak the Yale Spirit waits for high noon,
and at sunset it looks for another sunburst " with new spangled
ore" to "flame in the forehead of" another " morning sky,"
and in hours of midnight darkness it cries to the watchman,
" Watchman, what of the night," and listens in undoubting
faith for the reply, " The morning cometh."
Truth ! The Yale Spirit waits by the everlasting rocks of
Truth, upon which billows of lies and bigotry and selfishness
and despotisms and wars and anarchies and chaos break in
froth and foam. It hears truth — harmonies in law — the laws
of science and religion and progress and civilization. And to
the final judgments of truth uttered after full and fair trial, it
yields obedience — no matter at what cost of prejudice and
bias, no matter what record of semi-sacred traditions and phi-
losophies are tumbled into the waste basket.
But the Yale Spirit is not complete in the motto of the seal.
To the foundation words, Lux et Veritas, it adds " et fortitudo"
which translated for the benefit of the fading memories and
incomplete scholarships of the alumni brethren means "sand."
This is the quality which wins debates after many a defeat, —
a quality in this regard incarnated in many an undergraduate,
and conspicuously in that accomplished professor, scholar, and
loyal son of Yale, Arthur T. Hadley. This is the quality which
carries the batsman to the winning run when two men are
out and when two strikes are called in the ninth inning ; it
scatters flying wedges and guards back formations on the grid-
iron, and it has carried the blue to the front in so many a
fight, moral, intellectual, and physical, and so many times in
face of so many odds.
71
We have now added fortitudo to our Lux et Veritas. We
must add one more word, " lux et Veritas et fortitudo et fraterni-
tas." This last is after all the supreme characteristic of Yale.
On the campus brother meets brother and man meets man.
As the sum of ethics is found in that combination of love and
justice, the brotherhood of man, so Yale is stronger than the
strongest in her recognition of worth and nobility in her men,
without criticism of their antecedents of lineage or wealth, and
in her sons standing together as brothers in peace and as a
phalanx in strife.
Among the latest absurdities of our rage for societies whose
membership relates only to the past, I observed a society whose
membership is limited to Americans who may rightfully claim
for some buried ancestor a coat of arms. Fraternity needs
stronger cords than that. When a maniac upon that subject
once asked the late President Pierce what was his coat of arms,
the President replied, " My father's shirt sleeves at Bunker
Hill."
Last fall a football trophy was in peril and it almost seemed
a certainty that the tradition that Yale is never beaten twice
by the same team would be broken. This Yale spirit of broth-
erhood, which we find added in the quartet to light, and truth,
and sand, seized the bugle and rang an alarm like Robin
Hood's through Sherwood Forest. And from the East and the
West and the North and the South the heroes of many victories,
football experts beyond compare, came in troops to the athletic
field to save the blue flag, and to keep the old motto from breach.
I should like to name this loyal legion from Walter Camp,
facile princeps ! to Captain Butterworth, honor to him ! Yale
enthusiasts all, coming to help as plucky a captain and
plucky a team as ever honored Yale at football, but Brother
Twichell will do that thing better than I can. But that
spirit of Yale brotherhood was invincible, and another victory
over brave and stalwart Princeton was added to the long
catalogue.
It is this element of Yale Spirit which has led so many of
our loved professors, Brush and Sumner, and Lounsbury, and
Brewer, and Gibbs, and Chittenden, and others, to reject many
an offer of a higher salary and a more pretentious title. Like
Moses of old, in the language of one of my old deacons who
had a way of mixing scriptural phrases, " preferring rather to
72
suffer affliction with the people of God than to be called the
son of Pharaoh's daughter." It was this sense of loyal broth-
erhood which led that remarkable specimen of mathematics,
angles, and learning, our old friend Prof. Loomis, to give so
much of his private fortune to the University. Recently it
has led that professor, easily first of all Americans, perhaps
of all living men, in his special science, Professor Marsh, to
give his valuable private archaeological collection to Peabody
museum.
This then, in brief, for we have many voices to hear, is the
Yale Spirit — light and truth and courage and brotherhood.
And why do we rejoice in it ? Not alone nor chiefly because it
makes a fine ideal, but because it adds to the best resources of
individual manhood. It makes us as lawyers better, as clergy-
men better, as journalists better, as merchants, farmers, rail-
road men, all better and stronger and braver and purer. And
more, it makes us better Americans. And what a privilege,
what a duty to be a true American ! What legacies of honor
and bravery and patriotism ! What traditions of freedom and
independence and minding our own business is his heritage !
While yielding to no one in admiration of the English com-
mon law and English literature, I pity the man with an Amer-
ican birthright who is a modern anglomaniac paying his devo-
tions to the weaknesses of the English aristocracy, waving
palm branches and weaving halo crowns for Charles I. as a
martyr, sending messages of congratulation to that highly re-
spectable woman who by the accident of birth is queen of
England upon New York's relations to her ancestor, George
III. You remember the lines written or quoted by Thackeray :
George the ist was very vile,
George the 2d viler,
And no mortal ever heard
Any good of George the 3d.
When the 4th to hell descended,
Praise to God the Georges ended.
It is often and truly said that the life of the scholar is an-
tagonistic to the life of the soldier. But the scholar has no
antagonism to the patriot, and when patriotism calls to arms,
the scholar's ear is quick to catch the sound. In 1774 Yale's
President Stiles said : " We are to have another Runnymede in
10 73
America," and in 1775 he was busy in camp. In 1779 old ex-
President Naphtali Daggett, with his fowling piece blazing at
British regulars, made one of the most striking pictures of the
Revolution, and a greater man than either of these presidents,
a tutor at College, and a brigade chaplain in the Army, edu-
cated the youth of Yale, and everybody else in the reach of his
influence, in the burning lessons of American independence,
Timothy D wight, grandfather of our own loved Timothy.
Don't forget that from her small number of alumni, less than
one thousand in all, Yale sent 234 officers and soldiers to active
service in the Revolution. What seat of learning can tell a
better story of devotion ? And when our country again called
to arms in 1861, Yale sent 758 of her alumni to defend the
Union. And what a catalogue of heroes these earlier and later
wars made for Yale ! We may not name them — let us rather
remember the " glorious milky way of their multitude." But,
as to young Lycidas, dead ere his prime, let us drop one leaf,
be it Judge Finch's " fame leaf or angel leaf," to that incarna-
tion of the Yale Sprit, Nathan Hale.
May the breath of the old Simon Pure triple X Yale Spirit
never forsake the Campus, nor the bosoms of the alumni, nor
the activities of the nation ! May it long live in its purity and
power to make good students in the republic of letters, good
citizens of the republic of Old Glory, and good men in the
brotherhood of humanity !
An Address at a New York city Banquet of the Sons of
the American Revolution, in 1 892 : —
The distinguished president of the New York society, who
fails to fulfill his destiny unless he secures seven oratorical tri-
umphs a week, in his characteristic opening address told us we
had no politics and all kinds of politics here. His words and
this company of eminent statesmen upon my left suggest to
me possibilities. Perhaps the Sons may be called to larger
political duties in the coming nominating conventions than we
suspect.
It is not impossible that our friends at Chicago may fall into
confusion and anxieties for a fresh candidate. What more
seemly thing could they do than to come to the Sons and drop
their honors on the head of him who sits by my side ? Our pres-
74
ident says that he is always young. Let him be the young
men's candidate of the Sons !
The heart, the heart is the heritage
That keeps the old man young.
(Turning to Mr. Dana and bowing.)
And if our other friends at Minneapolis become confused
and anxious for a new candidate (it is understood that New
York State has none as yet), what better could they do than to
come for one whose thorough agricultural experience at Peeks-
kill will insure him the support of the Alliance, and whose nine-
teenth-century railroad experience will gain him the votes of
the rest of the country, and whose brain is large enough to fill
out any grandfather's hat in the National Museum, and who sits
to-night at the head of our table.
Let me congratulate the society upon to-day's work of the
convention in its important step toward a union with our sister
organization. This separation should not be continued. Two
associations with kindred inspirations, banners, and legends,
but living in different tents, are yet separated by the narrowest
kind of a stream, and one so easily bridged. God send that the
bridge be built at once !
You have introduced me as hailing from Connecticut ; it is
the best place to hail from. We point to our roll and its 650
members with honest pride, but with larger pride for the rea-
son of it. The Connecticut Sons of the American Revolution
are many because the Connecticut fathers in the Revolution
were many.
Connecticut's territory was seldom the scene of battle. Her
zeal was more than the zeal of self-defense and the protection
of farm and home. There was no border-line between Connect-
icut and Bunker Hill, and Connecticut and Trenton. Enjoying
as we do to-night the princely hospitality of the New York
Sons, the close ties that bound Connecticut to New York in the
Revolution rise to our thoughts. There is Fort Washington,
and we recall the heroic defense of it by the colonists from
Pennsylvania and Maryland and Connecticut against the over-
whelming assault of British grenadiers, infantry, and Hes-
sian hirelings, and we see watching the conflict, and with un-
checked tears in their eyes as they saw the bloody bayonets
driven into the hearts of the garrison, side by side, George
75
Washington and Israel Putnam, and with them Gen. Greene
and Col. Knox.
There was Bowling Green with its gilded leaden statue of
George the Third, torn down and sent to the hills of Litchfield,
where the brave women of Connecticut melted it into bullets
and loaded them into 40,000 cartridges to replenish our slender
stores of ammunition.
I think of yonder Long Island, — Long Island which you
stole from us, as well as several other Islands, not to mention
the east banks of the Hudson, including Peekskill and all the
then unguessed greatness which has since come out of it. Long
Island — to it we sent our most charming sacrifice — bright
with the light of youth and hope, purest of soul, and noblest of
purpose, willing to die as a spy for a cause which held his
heart. And if we gave Nathan Hale to Long Island, Long
Island gave to Connecticut Benjamin Tallmadge, the most
effective of the Revolutionary dragoons, the pet of Washing-
ton ; and the tie which then bound Connecticut and New York
in that noble colonel has bound us together ever since in his
worthy descendants.
In the winter of '76 Washington sent for cavalry to Colonel
Sheldon's regiment at Wethersfield. To Colonel (then captain)
Tallmadge was committed the charge of four companies. They
crossed Connecticut and the Hudson and down to the headquar-
ters at Morristown. The horses of Captain Tallmadge's own
company were dapple-gray and accoutred in black leather.
They reached Litchfield on Saturday and spent the Lord's day
there. Connecticut people went to church on Sunday then, and
they do now, although it looks as if those of us who are with
you to-night would have to worship in New York this time.
It was a striking scene in the old church upon the Green.
Cornwallis's fleet was almost at our shores, and rumor had an-
nounced it and added to its size. In the old pews were the vil-
lagers and the patriotic troops ; in the pulpit was the Rev.
Judah Champion.
To refresh your memories of the inspirations of the Revolu-
tionary church militant in New England, and to remind you of
the oratorical powers of the Reverend father, let me read you
his prayer at morning service :
O Lord, we view with terror the approach of the enemies of Thy holy
religion. Wilt Thou send storm and tempest to toss them upon the sea and
76
to overwhelm them upon the mighty deep, or to scatter them to the utter
most parts of the earth. But, peradventure, should any escape Thy ven-
geance, collect them together again, O Lord, as in the hollow of Thy hand,
and let Thy lightnings play upon them. We beseech Thee, moreover, that
Thou do gird up the loins of these Thy servants who are going forth to fight
Thy battles. Make them strong men, that "one shall chase a thousand,
and two shall put ten thousand to flight." Hold before them the shield with
which Thou wast wont in the old time to protect Thy chosen people. Give
them swift feet that they may pursue their enemies, and swords terrible as
that of Thy Destroying Angel, that they may cleave them down when they
have overtaken them. Preserve these servants of Thine, Almighty God, and
bring them once more to their homes and friends, if Thou canst do it con-
sistently with Thine high purposes. If, on the other hand, Thou hast de-
creed that they shall die in battle, let Thy spirit be present with them and
breathe upon them, that they may go up as a sweet sacrifice into the courts
of Thy temple, where are habitations prepared for them from the founda-
tion of the world.
And now a word or two of the duties of our society.
We have learned by the hardest of lessons that we are a
nation with a nationality, an indestructible nation beyond the
assault of secession and division — that the Declaration was by
the people, and that the Constitution was by the people. This
elemental truth on which our life depends must never again be
questioned.
When it is yielded, it will be time to go again to Riverside,
where the cornerstone of our great soldier's tomb was laid a
few hours ago with the earnest words of the president of our
national society, and the memorial eloquence of our chairman
of this evening, and to pull down the pile and to scatter ashes
over the sacred acres. It will be time to tear the name of Lin-
coln from our histories.
But there is another truth which we must never forget and
which our society may well memorialize.
If the Declaration was made by the people, it was made by
the colonies struggling to Statehood. If the Constitution is an
organic law by the people, it is also a treaty between newly-
born sovereignties. If we are a Nation, we are also a Union.
Ours is the Nation of the United States. Our early legend was
" E Pluribus Unum" When the fathers lighted up the sky for
their descendants and for humanity, it was not by a single sun,
it was by a constellation, whose song was as joyful as the song
of the morning stars at the birth of creation.
And the best future of the republic calls upon us to keep
77
alive the flavors and traditions of the several communities. It
would be dull indeed if we were fused into a uniform manhood
like that bastard of art — a composite photograph.
Geography forbids it ; nature forbids it. The hills, the prai-
ries, the seas, the lakes, the rivers, the mountain laurels, the
golden-rod, the arbutus, the violets, the daisies, the roses, the
fruits, the trees, the climates, all tell us that our enormous power
is in our diversity in unity. Keep up the local histories. Tell
and tell again the old tales of the East and the West and the
North and the South, and let the local treasures of character
and industry and wisdom and love come in to carry us on far-
ther in growth and development.
Another thought for the society. Pardon me for saying it
is not unimportant.
Our duties to the fathers, of filial reverence and affection,
are sacred. Our sonship is also a precious gift. But if our son-
ship stands only in the written disclosures of a genealogical
tree, it is but a mockery.
The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee,
A clover any time to him is aristocracy.
For us the question is one of honey and not of stalk.
My reverend and honored friend upon my right, a bishop of
the Church, I am sure will assent to my proposition that the
best Apostolical succession is the one which succeeds to the
qualities of the Apostles.
If we would be worthy sons of the fathers, let us not rest
our credentials upon entries in the family Bibles. Let us in-
herit their virtues — their faith, no night was too dark for them
to see the stars ; their hope, no night was too long for them to
wait for the coming, from below the horizon, of the sun ; their
courage, which no snows of New England or floating ice in the
Delaware could chill, which hunger and thirst and nakedness
could not cast down ; their patriotism, which tolerated no per-
sonal ambitions nor selfishness, but which suffered and strug-
gled on and on, by day and night, in winter and summer, to
build a republic, whose banner — may it float forever ! — shines
with the stars of " old glory."
78
An Essay on Christian Missions, read at the Monday
Evening Club in Hartford:
The question suggested for our discussion to-night is girt
with difficulties on every hand, and the little stock of wisdom
which the essayist has been able to bring to its consideration
has only made it clear to his mind that in this matter we are
walking as yet only in twilight ; but it is the twilight of a ris-
ing and not a setting sun.
This essay, which is intended as a suggestion to bring out
the wisdom of the club, moves from the standpoint of enthusi-
astic adherence to a pure Christianity as declared and inaugu-
rated by its founder, whose Lordship and mastery it unquali-
fiedly admits. This Christianity is assumed to be the complete
system of religious life and truth open to man. While on the
one hand the claims of many of its adherents that all other re-
ligions excepting the Hebrew religion are false and abomina-
ble, are not supported by the words or life or principles of the
Master, who claims for himself a fulfilling and not a destructive
mission, on the other hand, the suggestion now not infre-
quently made that Christianity is to be succeeded by something
better in future larger development of the race, is rejected.
It is true that historic Christianity is constantly changing,
swinging now nearer to and now farther from its pure original,
as it conforms more or less to the composite elements which
have come into the chemistries of its constitution, or obeys
more or less the extrinsic forces which have rushed in, like a
flood, upon it. And doubtless it is true that the Christianity of
the future must and will come back more and more to its sim-
ple sublime original thoughts and purposes — the dross of all
kinds which encompasses the pure ore, the chaff of all kinds,
wood, hay, and stubble in which the solid grain is found, must
all be burned.
There are a thousand things which are and have been of
this historic Christianity, many of which have already dropped
away and many more of which will drop away, while the most
fitting of them will survive. Thus, while our Lord was par-
ticular to avoid all ecclesiastical establishments, His church
has taken on, as it must have done in the nature of the case, all
kinds of methods and incidents of ecclesiasticism, as Popes,
and Priests, and Prelates, and Princes, and Presbyteries, and
79
Metropolitans, and Councils, and Synods, and Convocations.
And while our Lord founded no school of philosophy, His
church has assumed all kinds of philosophy — Augustinianism,
Calvinism, Scholasticism, Neo-Platonism, Nominalism, Real-
ism, and countless other "isms."
Savageries, too, have attached to the church, as inquisitions,
the sword of the crusader, excommunications, and heresy hunt-
ing. Most of these have dropped altogether out of church his-
tory, and the rest are only lingering for a few days in the sere
leaf.
But despite all the occasional tyrannies and violence of its
ecclesiasticism, the occasional subtleties and absurdities of its
philosophy, Christianity has gone forward to elevate and civil-
ize mankind, and there has been no period so dark but in many
hearts there burned the pure fire of Christian life, and in many
minds there reigned in purity the unutterably great truths of
Christianity.
And this last thought is our first point in discussing the
subject of Christian Missions.
Christianity is essentially an aggressive and pervasive thing,
and that universally. It is tied to no nation, is controlled by
no climate, is bound up in no single age or aeon, is chained to
no dynasty nor family. Its field is the human heart, its family
the human race, its scene, time and eternity. Its Divine mas-
ter charged his friends and disciples to preach the gospel —
good news — to every creature.
From his own lips the assurance came that He incarnated
the everlasting love of God ; that he came to save men's lives,
not to destroy them ; that he was the way, the truth, and the
life ; that he died to attract a world, and his last legacies were
peace of soul and the promise of his own everlasting presence.
This gospel was to be preached to every creature. He
compared its nature to the most rapid upspringing and growth
of vegetable life, from the tiniest seed to the measureless fruit,
from the dying kernel to the diffusive leaven, elevating the
material of the single human heart and of the heart of society,
and making them healthful.
He fulfilled the righteousness of Judaism ; He took gifts
from the learned men of the Orient ; He talked with the Greeks
before his tragic death ; He pictured his Kingdom here and
hereafter as flooded with incomers from the East and the West
80
and the North and the South. His picture of the crisis of souls
revealed all the nations parting to the right hand and to the
left in the discriminations of character.
The Christian system has prevailed nearly nineteen centu-
ries, but the world, counting by heads, is still pervaded by the
leaven of his Kingdom, to less than one-half of its population.
The work must go on, and it falls to our generation, as it
has to its predecessors, to carry it forward.
And we ought to come to the duty with no less devotion
and with more wisdom and power than did the fathers. True,
we have not the accident of the great Roman Empire reaching
out over all the world as at the first ; but we have much greater
elements of power in our modern inventions and the processes
of modern civilization. For the first time in history we know
who and what the so-called heathen are.
Our missions have largely aimed at the conversion of savage
tribes. We are discovering in worlds only yesterday almost
unknown great strength of civilization and intellectual culture
and moral goodness.
And, as significant of the immense assistance given to Chris-
tianity by our modern inventions, remember that in the last
twenty-five years in which the English have introduced rail-
roads and telegraphs and canals and education into India, the
pervasion of Christianity has been greater than in all the pre-
vious history of missions there.
One fact which has hitherto been a great hindrance to
missions is likely, by and by, to be a great advantage. I
refer to the differences of view in Christian philosophy and
in church organizations, as marked by differing sects and
religious bodies, and which have heretofore been the subject of
jealousy, quarrel, hate, strife, and often even of bloodshed.
These differences are to become a source of missionary strength.
The idea of Christian Unity is taking on a more rational form.
It is getting to be conceded that men will not think alike until
they look alike — the analogy of differing features in human
faces — of differing trees and flowers and rocks and hills and
streams and clouds in nature are absolutely significant of intel-
lectual distinctions which will never fuse, and ought never to
fuse, into a monotony. Unity is to be sought in a common
obedience to God, a common discipleship to His sublime Rep-
resentative, a common love to man. The common meeting of
ii 81
Christian disciples will soon be at the Lord's table, and not at
man's table, furnished by men, with tickets of invitation issued
by men only to other men who have certain antecedent outfits
of philosophical opinion or ecclesiastical degrees. And when
Christian unity stands in Christian character, with no surrender
of individual or denominational views, except as they interfere
with that mutual respect for and charity to our neighbors
which the gospel requires, and which in all other matters but
religion the present tolerant age requires, then the separation
into sects, which is both natural and wise, will give the really
United Christian Church a power of extension never before
known. For as there are and will be sectarian differences in
Christendom as it is, they must also exist in extended Christen-
dom as it will be.
These well-known facts can be used in the true economy of
missions. The African will be left to his natural preferences —
to the fervors of Methodism or even of the Salvation Army, to
the comprehensive and complete ablutions of Anabaptism, and
to the gorgeous tinsel and gorgeous beauties of the Roman
Ritual. The Buddhists and Theosophists will naturally come
to Christianity through the most highly cultivated and thought-
ful and broad communions.
The benighted heathen, in many places where Rome and
the Greek Church and the Abyssinian and Coptic Churches
have nominal power, would be best set right by the beautiful
decencies, and by the respect for historic office and authority
of the Reformed Episcopal Communions, and doubtless that
austere and chilling philosophy, which has done so much for
civilization from the time of Augustine to Calvin, and from
Calvin to the present century, but which now seems to be
everywhere yielding in Christendom to more reasonable and
wholesome views of God and man, will still have a part to play
in lands whose culture and development is behind that of the
United States and England and Germany.
Intellectual and temperamental distinctions will be recog-
nized and the form of Christianity which best fits the place and
the man will be not only given the field, but assisted in the
field by other Christians. This is already conceded in litera-
ture and education of the mind, and why not in religious edu-
cation ?
This mutual respect involves no surrender of individual
82
belief, partiality, or love. I may fancy the social life and
ways of my own household, but I may not treat with disrespect
the conscientious views of my neighbor who sits up an hour
later at night, dines at noon, and wears full dress at family
table.
Society is broad enough for great differences in the pres-
ence of underlying principles of courtesy and refinement.
And the immense advantage of sectarian differences, in
presence of individual charity and respect, must be apparent
to any student of history. The Roman Catholic Missions,
which at times have been distinguished by great success, have
usually treated Protestant churches as heretical, and the paths
of heresy and heathenism as only two highways to a common
hell.
Much has been already accomplished. I know that it is
easy to show that in some quarters, particularly in savage
lands, the relapses of so-called converts have been very
marked. Usually these men have been induced to submit to
baptism as an escape from a flaming hell, or to assent to some
statements of which their ideas were as clear as the clouds of
chaos (if there were clouds in chaos), and their relapse, if made,
has not been very large ; but without counting so-called con-
verts, the influence of our missions has been grand and good.
And that at least in these two regards : first, by giving to other
nations our Scriptures ; and second, by giving them our edu-
cational methods. Whatever one may think about the unity of
the Scriptures, and of the dishonor which superstition has often
placed and does now often place upon our sacred literature by
idolizing it, it is submitted without fear of dispute by fair men,
that it is better and truer and more highly inspired, and when
we include in it, as we may and must, the words of our Lord,
incomparably better and truer than any other literature that is
or has been.
And it is quite possible that portions of the old Hebrew
Scriptures, which have been more or less of a hindrance and
stumbling block to pure Christian souls, by reason of bad edu-
cation as to what they were and wherein they were profitable,
may be even an element of great power in Christianizing some
of the old nations.
Doubtless Old Testament history helped Mahomet, as doubt-
less the apostolic misapprehension of our Lord's second advent
83
and of the end of the world helped the early church to great
success.
The oriental mind has no apprehension of the value of time,
of individual rights, or of the beautiful mission of woman —
absolutely elemental things in Christianity.
Given now our methods of education, our advances in the
sciences, our railroads and steamboats and telegraphs and in-
credibly ingenious machinery telling the story of the value of
time and the worth of industry, and our democratic ideas of
the rights of the individual under constitutional law, and the
dignity which we give to woman, Christianity has got a civili-
zation to carry it along, her own civilization too, so certain to
supersede the inferior civilizations of the East, that it must
ultimately leaven the whole lump of humanity. And while, if
we look only at the square miles where Christianity is the dom-
inant religion, and count only the number of faces which are up-
lifted to the highest ideal of God, we must admit that the harvest
seems to be afar off, yet, if we look beneath the surface to the
civilization which has been already wrought in these peoples
by our education and by the inspirations of our Scriptures, we
shall see that in spite of untoward agencies made by the greed
of Christian folks, as by the opium trade and rum trade, and
by bodily lust, India, and Japan, and China are becoming per-
vaded with the Kingdom whose real coming is not with obser-
vation, as of processions and drums and banners and cannon.
It is a fair question whether certain things in Scripture
which have been interpreted to mean that Christianity must
first triumph in the hearts of the unlettered have not been
pressed too far. Passages like " The foolishness of preach-
ing," " Not many wise, not many mighty," " Out of the mouths
of babes," etc., have been often quoted as somehow forbidding
us to hope for progress in the schools of other philosophies
than ours. When we look at the culture of India it would seem
as if the ripeness of its intellectual life must be a ripeness for
intellectual truth.
While Christianity always weakens when it aims at conflicts,
it cannot weaken while anywhere engaged in honest contest for
truth, and an intelligent and courteous and loving effort to
bring the philosophy of life declared by our Lord into the
thought of the great and good men of India, and Japan, and
China must be successful.
84
A word now about statistics. I have not gone into the
history of missions, it would take too long ; nearly all branches
of the church, and all Christian nations have attempted to
carry them forward ; on the whole, our American people have
done their fair share, and as well as the others, and better than
most. But our doing is, after all, not over large. England
spends $5,000,000 a year in foreign missions. The United
States perhaps one-half that amount.
It is doubtful if over $20,000,000 to $25,000,000 is spent by
the whole of Christendom upon foreign missions, and yet the
United States spends $900,000,000 a year upon ardent spirits,
wine, and beer.
Our American people spend for this investment, which on
the whole is a horrible one, forty times as much as the Christian
world spends directly to carry on this work. But as has been
before referred to, this Kingdom of Heaven comes not by
observation, and the agencies of our century are radiating
Christianity as never before in ways which do not appear in
the books of religious statistics.
This age with its justice to history, its critical interpreta-
tions, its scholarship, its new science of comparative religion, is
gradually discovering as the real stars in our sky at night and the
sun in our sky at day, the elemental truths of Christianity. A
personal God, and He a loving, forgiving Father, maker of
heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, a perfect
life in humanity bringing us back to His love and revealing to
us in the supreme of moral character the true being of the
Invisible God, man His child with a divine nature and a per-
sonal immortality, good character the condition of eternal life
and bad character the condition of eternal death, the everlast-
ing distinctions between right and wrong, the brotherhood of
the human race, the greatness of the individual soul, the beauty
of self-sacrifice, righteousness the foundation and love the
consummation of moral being, the ugliness of selfishness, the
charm of ministration, the beastliness of aggrandizement and
greed, the worth of sincerity, the hollowness of sham and
hypocrisy, the rewards of charity and consideration, and the
hideousness of intolerance and bigotry.
In the presence of such immortal living truths as these,
catholic facts for the experience of human life, how petty do
our sectarian distinctions, to which we are so much attached,
85
appear ! Let our missionaries be equipped with these things,
no matter what their names may be.
And if we could only complement the good words and
good works of our missionaries with good lives in business and
society of our sailors and merchants and visiting midshipmen,
and our East India Bombay companies and our horse railway
companies, the triumphs of our missionary labors would be
immensely increased. The gospel was radiated from Jerusa-
lem. Let us go there to-day. At what is supposed to be the
Holy Sepulchre, representatives of two large communions, each
claiming to be the only orthodox and the only catholic church
of Christ, celebrate religious ceremonies. They are preserved
from violence and personal conflict by the scimitar of the
Musselman soldier, who keeps the peace between them.
Greek, Roman, and Armenian Christians look at each other in
disdain and hate. Is that all there is of Christianity in Jeru-
salem ? Oh, no, there is lineal succession of the Master in
spiritual things there. I read only a few weeks ago in a letter
which sketched in a graphic way the idolatries and mummeries
and quarrels at the sepulchre, of a little band of American
young men taught of an American layman in their own coun-
try, who passed in and out on missions of love and charity and
mercy and education, and were cordially welcomed by Moslem
and Armenian, and were honoring and promoting a living
Christianity.
Doubtless the gentlemen in brilliant wardrobe, quarreling
at the tomb, consider these young men to be uncommissioned
adventurers and schismatical heretics.
We sometimes wonder that Buddhism numbers more ad-
herents than Christianity, that Mohammedism contests with us
in Asia and Africa, and this, two thousand years after the Res-
urrection.
But the world was many thousand years old before the Sun
dawned, and it is yet only morning. The world was full of
individual despotisms entrenched in force and in the forms of
law. Where is personal despotism now ? Human slavery is of
the past. The nobility of woman has been discovered. The
infinite capacity and value of each individual man and his
rights and wrongs — human ability for self-government —
education becoming universal — superstition and idolatry dis-
appearing — the insane no more hunted to the hills — the sick
86
and the sad the objects of tender ministration — rank and
heritage and accidental superiority yielding- to virtue and
worth — these, and how much more has Christianity wrought !
And now we are discovering the merits and demerits of other
religions, and of their sacred books, and the many precious
things which we hold in common with them, the demerits,
too, in our own historic religion, for demerits it has none in its
original purity. We have learned that one seer is worth to his
age a dozen fore-seers, one benefaction worth a hundred wink-
ing images, that the Son of man and all true sons of men " came
not to be ministered unto, but to minister " ; that the Almighty
Father has written every law in love, that truth is harmonious,
that there can be no warfare between science which discovers
laws of God, and the study of invisible things which discovers
other laws of the same Infinite Being.
And in this regeneration of an imperfect humanity, know-
ing in part and easily drifting to selfishness and to the engross-
ing pursuit of things which are seen, Christianity has wrought
greatly, in spite of fightings and fears without and within, and
has even greater works to appear in the coming centuries.
Decoration Day Address at Rockville, 1897, to Burpee
Post, G. A. R.:
Our holidays seem to be few when we look abroad to some
other nations and back to other ages. To the pious fathers the
word itself was significant of idleness and superstition. It was
entered into the statute-book by indirection, but it is there now,
and is not a bad word. Of the few days which our calendar
calls holidays, none is so tender in its sentiment as Decoration
day. It comes when the brook of May's budding life meets the
river of June's mantle of luxuriant verdure. Its symbols are
not the ripe grain of Thanksgiving nor the evergreens and
holly berries of Christmas, but the unfolding blossoms of roses
and honeysuckle and laurel.
Twenty-nine years ago you instituted this sacrament of love
for your comrades — a sacrament whose visible elements are
pure and sweet flowers, and whose inspirations are patriotism
and fellowship. A great nation uncovers before you in your
march, salutes you in reverence and gratitude, and, as you leave
your garlands upon the graves of the dead, kneels with you in
benediction. The friends of law and free government all over
87
the round globe beat time to the music of your tread. Thirty-
six years ago the first cannon-ball broke the masonry of Sum-
ter ; thirty-two years ago the clouds of war rolled away at Ap-
pomattox. A new generation of men has been born, new tides
of immigration have poured upon our shores, new inventions
have been made, distances have been beaten down, the nations
are in close touch, and there is no isolation in the peoples of the
earth. The children who listened in wonder to your stories
of battles are men and women now, and are studying the news
from Cuba and Thessaly. Your column is smaller by the birth
of each new spring, and the majority, which is at rest, is grow-
ing larger and larger.
It is an honor to contribute to the services of the hour words
of sympathy and gratitude — to meet with this vigorous Post
and to salute it — to recall the noble officer whose name is hon-
ored by your selection, and which honors you by its use. He
was a typical Connecticut soldier ; clean, pure, unselfish, brave,
and patriotic. His career, from his enlistment in the Four-
teenth to his mortal wound at Cold Harbor, won him a high
place in the long catalogue of heroes who died to preserve un-
broken the union of the States. He left us in the morning of
life, but he had finished a work of devotion and sacrifice. And
who shall say that the stream of his young life, lost to our sight,
like the sunken river Humboldt, has not somewhere already
reappeared and found fairer banks and bluer skies than ours ?
What son of Connecticut, though his tongue stammers and his
voice is feeble, can speak of the Connecticut soldier but in words
of enthusiasm ? Her contributions of men and means in the
colonial wars, in the war for independence, and in the war for
freedom and the preservation of the nation, have given our
commonwealth an enviable eminence. And yet no hostile
camp has been pitched within her borders. Her soldiers, un-
disciplined and untrained, but hardy and tough, under Putnam
and Knowlton, at first recruits, but later veterans, under Terry
and Birge, Hawley and Harland, Foote and Burpee, and the
other leaders, left friends and homes for the common causes of
the colonies and the nation.
And what pages of history show such an army of volunteers
as rallied around Old Glory from '61 to '65 ? It was an army of
the youth of the North stirred by conscience and honor and
duty-call. The adventurer was an exception. The rank and
88
file were patriots. They loved home, they loved law, they loved
education, they loved liberty, they loved the flag, and for these
sanctities they were ready to offer themselves for service and
suffering and death. It has been well said that the signal suc-
cesses of the German army in '66 and '70 were due less to Ger-
man generals than to German schoolmasters. It is equally true
of the success of the Army of the Republic. They went to the
front not as conscripts or hirelings, but as volunteers, whose
minds have been educated in the school, whose hearts were
warm with love of country, and whose souls burned with devo-
tion to God and duty. For them it was a short step from the
awkward-squad stage of the recruit to the easy swing and cool
courage of the veteran, not only, or chiefly, for their tough
fibers of muscle and nerve, but for the intelligence and con-
science which were inclosed in the folds, and under the caps, of
blue.
We look to our books, and the stories of wars are chiefly of
generals and officers, whose names are written in capitals — the
private soldier is unnamed, though his bravery is recorded.
Rarely does his name appear in the newspapers. By and by,
when he dies, it is carved upon a headstone or written upon a
wooden slab. But where would the record of the brave officers
appear but for the valor of the unnamed hosts ? You did not
enlist to get your individual records into print, but to save your
country and to fulfill your own sublime sense of duty. Who
can tell me the name of anyone of the three hundred Spartans
or the seven hundred Thespians who fell with Leonidas at
Thermopylae ? Who can give us the name of any one of the
six hundred and seventy cavalrymen of the Light Brigade who
rode into the " Valley of Death " at Balaklava under Lord Car-
digan ? And is the substance of their immortality lost because
these heroes have left on the pages of literature no " shadow of
a name " ?
We are doing honor to the memory of patriots and founders
by many organizations. The descendants of the Pilgrims, of
the founders, and the Colonial warriors, of the Revolutionary
soldiers, and the sons of Grand Army sires, are forming associ-
ations to honor their distinguished and patriotic predecessors.
Sisters and daughters and wives join the movement. It is well,
and more than well ; and organizations to honor you and your
devotion will and should multiply. These organizations are
12 89
wholesome. They develop sentiment, and what is life without
sentiment ? They induce historical study ; they bring out local
traditions and the lessons of good individual lives. They bind
us closer to our native land. But they bring also new dangers.
We have no classes in our country, and need none. Lincoln
split rails, Grant worked in a tanyard, Cleveland was a sheriff.
If our patriotic societies stand upon gold badges and insignia
and only the glory of the fathers, they will develop snobbery
and pride. If they keep alive the virtues of the fathers, and
educate the people in lessons of liberty and law and education
and religion and American principles and Connecticut tradi-
tions, they will add to the strength and progress and best de-
velopment of the nation. So may they always do !
This year abounds in memorials. The City of Brotherly
Love, the home of the Liberty Bell, and the birthplace of the
Constitution has added to the memorials of the Father of his
Country a statue of noble proportions and commanding form.
And with fitting words the President of the United States has
delivered to the commercial metropolis the memorial tomb
at Riverside, where shall rest, side by side with the companion
of his struggles and his glories, the great captain of the armies
of the Republic. The magazines and journals, after peppering
us for a year and a half with endless charges of birdshot in
the cause of realistic fiction, and until our skins were full and
our blood tainted with Trilby, opened upon us with Napoleon,
and for months and months cannonaded us with Napoleon by
hot shot and bombshell. At last they have given us a welcome
rest from exploiting his career, and have refreshed us with
stories of Grant. What a blessed change ! These two generals
had a community of skill in the art of war. Napoleon, by what
is called genius, carried the so-called science of war to large re-
sults. Grant, by getting up earlier than the enemy, by staying
longer on the battlefield, by renewing an attack when his op-
ponents and most of his associates fancied he was whipped, by
hammering away at anything and everything in front of him
with the power and persistence of the storm-waves of ocean, by
never for a moment losing his presence of mind, or dropping
from his thoughts any part of his own army and its necessities,
and the enemy's as well, gave the students of the art of war
food for thought. But, if these two eminent personages had in
common the distinction of military eminence, as men they
90
were antipodes. One incarnated selfishness, the other patriot-
ism ; one reveled in glitter and glory, the modesty of the other
was only equaled by his graceful simplicity ; one loved and
worshiped himself, the other loved his fellow men and wor-
shiped his God ; one studied the heavens to find the star of
his own bloody destiny, the other looked for the sun of right-
eousness arising with healing wings upon a day of peace and a
re-united country ; one thirsted only with zeal to draw his
sword, the other hastened to return his to its sheath ; one hes-
itated before no cruelties and lies, the other sought only mer-
cies and truth ; one cared for no promise nor regarded any, the
other kept his word in the keeping of a white soul and an in-
vincible courage. The sufferings of his troops were nothing
to one, the galled flesh of an artillery horse touched the com-
passion of the other ; to one his country was a desirable scaf-
folding to use in building for himself and his a throne and a
dynasty, to the other his country was a supreme object for ser-
vice and consecration. Humiliation of a conquered foe was
sweet to the Corsican ; there was no room in the hand of Grant
for the hilt of Lee's sword, and the cavalry horses surrendered
to him by the men whom he had fought for four years were
returned to them for the peaceful services of agriculture. Na-
poleon was a great soldier by the standards of death and destruc-
tion, but when his soul was weighed against truth and honor,
and chivalry and sympathy and the charity of St. Paul's epistle
his scale flew into the air like a balloon. Grant was a great
soldier, perhaps the greatest captain of his age, but when the
scales which weigh character are brought forth (how trivial
now are swords and shoulder straps !) and righteousness, sin-
cerity, purity, magnanimity and modesty are the weights, we
have a standard of human excellence on hand rarely surpassed
in the world's list of military heroes, not by Gustavus Adolphus,
not by Joan of Arc, hardly even by Washington. The mag-
nificence of the demonstrations which surrounded the last com-
mittal of his sacred dust to its tomb by the Hudson was less in
real power than the silent tribute of love and gratitude which
moved from the hearts of millions and was eloquent above the
roar of cannon. The tears of the boys in blue mingled with
the tears of brave men in gray, the children of the heroes of
the Grand Army marched side by side with the children of
Confederates. Stern soldiers kept guard by Napoleon's coffin
91
when it was laid down in the Paris chapel. Armies and navies
honored the burial of Grant, but more, a civilized world wept
at his tomb. The magnificent tribute to the silent soldier was
deserved. The tribute to the unique character and nobility of
the man was even better.
And what are you telling us to-day, survivors of the Grand
Army of the Republic, and what are we saying to you ? To
you blessings and honors and grateful hymns ! You risked
life for us, and for yourselves, and for the generations to come.
The best we can say, the best we can do, is all too little for
you. The greater rewards of your own consciousness of duty
nobly done, of a nation saved, of humanity advanced, of liberty
and self-government re-established, will ring as bells in your
heart as you go down the " slopes of sunset," led, may it be, by
the Father's hand, and till you go to rest, one by one, with the
bugle call sounding "good night."
And what are you saying to us by your memorial services
to-day ? You are bidding us look up to the hills from whence
came your strength and to join in your doxologies and alleluias
to the God of our fathers. You are bidding us look about us and
see this fair land, with its vast resources of commerce and agri-
culture, with its factories and farms and schools and colleges
and churches, with its manifold and many peoples, all covered
by the protections of its Constitution and laws, and to love it.
You are bidding us look forward to its inestimable future of
greatness and progress. You are bidding us remember that
there are other enemies than the bayonets of armed resistance
to law ; enemies less conspicuous, but no less dangerous — cor-
rupt morals, physical, intellectual, and spiritual degeneracy,
snobbery and pride, irreverence for law, breaches of faith and
denials of human rights, oppressions on this side and license on
that. You are bidding us hold the Stars and Stripes in love
and reverence, and to let them never be waved and tossed
about at the hands of demagogic adventurers nor blatant jin-
goes. You are telling us that our country is large enough for
our best activities and statesmanship, and that the government
of the world has not yet been confided to us. You are bidding
us sympathize with every righteous struggle for freedom and
self-government. You are bidding us bury all bitterness of the
past in the onward and friendly activities of the Republic in
all its climes and latitudes. You are bidding us to be kind to
92
our neighbors and to be strong in the strength of minding our
own measureless business. You bid us be true to our tradi-
tions, jealous of our history, enthusiastic for our advance ; to
rejoice in the old pillars of fire and cloud, and to look for new
light and shade to guide and protect our future. You are tell-
ing us of the manliness and success of a life which you con-
secrated to your country's service in the days of battle, that
so you might make a highway for the feet of the blessed mes-
sengers who are bringing in the gospel of peace, a peace that
endures. If we would learn the bitterness of war and the in-
finite mercies of peace, we go to you whose scars and empty
sleeves are your credentials. To you, in this regard, would we
commend the loud-mouthed orators who breathe fire and flame
from their tongues, and shake swagger from their arms, in
the protection of the chamber walls of the United States
Senate.
March on, veterans, to the city of the dead! Lay your fresh
flowers upon the dust of your comrades ! Their voices call to
you from tent and battle front.
The picket-line in Virginia, the camp-fire in Carolina, the
mine, the trench, the hospital, the storm of battle, the bayonet
charge, the thirst, the wounds, the martyr's death, the victory,
are in your souls to-day, as flashed from the lenses of a bio-
graph.
Ring out again the old chorus, " Marching thro' Georgia,"
shout again the " Battle-cry of freedom." The voices of your
sleeping comrades may be in the harmony, though you may
not hear them ; their forms, clad again in blue, may be by
your side, though you may not see them.
93
Two Carols by Mr. Robinson from a volume of " Christ-
mas Carols " prepared and published by the " Union for
Home Work," of Hartford, 1876 :
Exult, ye sons of men,
'Tis clearest morn!
Exult, ye sons of men,
The child is born !
Born into human life,
O Light Divine !
Through clouded human life
Forever shine.
Chorus : Glory, peace, good- will,
To God, to men;
Glory, peace, good-will,
To God, to men.
Carol sweetly, children,
The Holy Child !
Carol gently, children,
The mother mild !
Carol in the twilight
Of matin gray ;
Carol in the twilight
Of closing day.
Glory, etc.
O Jesu, fill the mountain,
And fill the grove ;
Fill prairie, sea, and mountain
With thy sweet love.
Ye sons of men acclaim Him,
The Holy Child !
The Son of God, acclaim Him,
And Mary mild.
Glory, etc.
94
BETHLEHEM STAR.
When Bethlehem's star upon the sky
Its light of glory flamed,
The Orient sages caught its ray,
Its heavenly guidance claimed;
Obedient to its holy charm,
Rich gifts of love they bore,
Prostrate at gentle Mary's feet
The Saviour-child to adore.
From manger birth, through life of toil,
To waving palm from scorn,
From palm to cross, from cross to crown,
Thy path, O Woman-born !
And heavenly star, and halo-wreath,
And light white robe were Thine ;
And thunder voice and resting Dove
Declared Thy life Divine.
O Bethlehem's star! bright morning star!
Guide us to Jesus' feet!
Our souls to love, our lips to praise,
Our hearts with His to beat!
From sin to penitential tears
To purify our night ;
Through tears to faith, in faith to peace,
In peace to purest light.
95
H. C. R.
The gracious heart that overflowed
At every suffering human call ;
The pity without drop of gall,
The sympathy that warmed and glowed ;
The kindly eyes not keen of sight
For wrongs that weaker brothers wrought,
But through the fog of folly caught
A flash of something that was bright ;
The soul that throbbed in quick response
To deed of flame and winged word,
That bathed in Nature's healing fonts,
And sought the flower and loved the bird ;
The brain of power, the speech of grace —
Whose tones for truth and honor fell —
The faith that saw Redemption's face,
And heard the whisper, "All is well."
Here in this world they told of Thee,
Lord, didst Thou need them more than we ?
Atinic Eliot Trumbull.
H 289 85
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