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§ 1. The Cheerful Virtues of Emmons.

Living in a still parish, on a quiet road, he might have been expected to contract an awkwardness and stiffness of manner, an habitual reserve and shyness, from which a man of the world is free. Perhaps he did exhibit some constraint when with strangers in a strange place; but in his own study, no one need be more courteous and affable. Cordiality and good-will marked his reception of his guests; whether they harmonized or not with his political or theological views. They found in him many sympathies in common with their own ; they could not but sec that their company was a pleasure to him; and they accordingly felt the case and self-satisfaction, which it is the characteristic of a polite man to give his visitors. They expected to find an austere man, exsiccated by loyic and abstractions. But they looked upon a face which was a picture of hearty kindness and good-nature; and although he was not unused to a knit brow in his study hours, he would converse on the literature, the politics, the news of the day, with a freshness of interest belonging to a citizen moro than a scliolar. " Whence hath this mun these things ? " was the frequent query of his visitors. That largo, spacious white house, which every one would know was tho minister's house, with the venerable trees before it, and the neat enclosure around it, was often called the minister's hotel; and no minister's hurso would pass it a second time, without giving signs of pleasant remembrances.

Constitutionally, Emmons was a wit; if wit consist in tho power of detecting such resemblances between dissimilar objects, and such differences between resembling objects, as will both surprise and please. Acutencss of discrimination is needed for discovering these diversities and similitudes. Dr. Emmons was proverbially acute. Alcrtnc>s and vivacity of mind are essential for suddenly developing these relations. His mind was so rapid, that his witticisms would seem to come in showers. A brisk flow of animal spirits is necessary for that exercise which must at once produce two effects, astonish and please. He was seldom stupid, and the cheerfulness resulting from his well-controlled body and peaceful conscience, qualified him to please as well as to surprise. " He was tho most unifonnly cheerful man I ever knew," said a clergyman who had lived in his vicinity for thirty years.

Aware that wit is a dangerous faculty, he was philosophical in his management of it He indulged it, as he partook of food, for the soke of preserving that health of mind, as well as body, which is a necessary condition of the lushest Christian usefulness. He was not abstinent in all things, but tempcrato in all things. It is one sign of his true greatness, that ho could bo temperate in an indulgence from which weaker men abstain through fear of excess. He was free, on the one hand, from that superstition which dreads, as if sin were there, tho appropriate exercise of a faculty implanted in our natures by God, and tho tempered action of which docth good like a medicine. He was generally free, on the other hand, from humoring even a constitutional susceptibility further than a just equipoise of the system demanded. When he had slept enough, or drank enough, or smiled enough, ho would resume his toil. The indulgence of wit at improper times, in an improper degree, on improper subjects, becomes levity. From levity he was as free as from stupidity. U a serious topic required him to leave an amusing train of remark, he would drop his focctiousness, and show himself at homo in the discussion or tho admonition. The facility of his change from the one to the other, indicated that both were under the control of religious principle. When the bow was unstrung, it was so for a wise reason;

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and he would generally seize it and bend it at the instant of the summons. " Mankind," he was wont to remark, " were made for use, not for amusement."

It is difficult to say how much of his wholesome action had been lost, if he had harbored that anile bigotry which would banish from our spiritual mechanism the lubricating oil of joy, without which the wheels drag, and the machine wears out A man who could say, when nearly a century old, " I never took an hour's exercise for the sake of exercise, in my life," and who had withal some degree of constitutional irritability, would have become a morbid hypochondriac, or an obtuse plodder, unless his mind had received relaxation and tone, and elastic versatile energy, from the use of that gift which distinguishes men from brutes, and sane men from idiots. Indeed, there must have been some such recreation, in order to perpetuate his life through so many eventful periods, amid so many perplexing and fatiguing studies.

Some men, who are never guilty of startling others with agreeable remarks, have felt themselves authorized thereby to pronounce a censure upon Dr. Emmons as less apostolical in his conversation than they deem consistent with the command, " Be sober." But if sobriety consist in preserving the mental faculties free from indolence on the one hand, and morbid or useless action on the other, Dr. Emmons was a sober man. His gravity indeed was not such, that " Newton might have deduced from it the law of gravitation," yet it was a rational gravity. Few men have been further than he from that foolish talking and jesting which a scriptural philosophy condemns. There was a meaning in his wit. It was full of mind. One of our older writers would have said that his humor was not the " mere crackling of thorns, a sudden blaze of the spirits, the exultation of a tickled fancy, or a pleased appetite. It was a masculine and severe thing; the recreation of the judgment, the jubilee of reason." In what certain men would call his folly, he uttered more wise remarks than these wise men ever uttered in their wisdom. He knew what to say, and when and where to say it. In the private circle, on secular themes, he did not always express himself as if he were in the pulpit. He adhered to the resolution of President Edwards, " never to utter any thing that is sportive or matter of laughter on the Lord's day."

§ 2. The prolonged Tenacity of his Physical and Mental System.

In several applications of the term, tenacity was a prominent characteristic of bis body and his soul. It marked his predilections for men and things. He was a fast friend; a steadfast advocate of the truth. The power of long-continued attention raised him above common men. It may be said of him as he said of another, " He could look half an hour at the point of a needle, without moving an eye-lid." Long after others had let go their hold of an argument, or of a specific phraseology, he would hold on, and hold out, and keep hold, and never let go. Possessing an athletic and well-compacted frame, a sanguine bilious temperament, he was formed for protracted labor, and an old age tenacious of health and energy. Only three days before his death, he made a remark which, for sprightliness and shrewdness, savored of the fiower of his life. When eighty-three years of age he journeyed from Franklin to Haddam, driving his own horse forty miles a day, and conversing with singular cb»crimination. About the same time, he made one unwritten address to his townsmen, which was generally considered the happiest and most effective that ever came from him. It has been reported thns:

Some of his former parish, perceiving that their parochial guide had abandoned his sathority, and feeling disposed to tasto the sweets of freedom, modo an attempt to introduce Universalis! preachers into the old pulpit. The parish were called together to art upon a petition for opening their meeting-house, occasionally, to other denominations ; no particular sect being alluded to, but the Universalists being intended. Some of the Doctor's friends deemed it advisable to grant the petition, and hoped that a conciliating course would preclude a threatened schism. But he was inflexible. He said but little, and did nothing until the parish bell rung for the meeting. Then he called for his horse and chaise, calculated knowingly for the time spent in the preliminaries of business; and.whcn he supposed that his townsmen were ready to introduce the main topic, lie rude to the meeting-house door, and with a quick and firm step walked to his pew. Be took the parish by surprise. They had been looking for some other things, but not for this. The three-cornered hat, they all supposed, had been hung np, and this sodden ro-appcomncc of it was like a resurrection from the grave. A highly intelligent citizen was speaking at the moment, in favor of indulging the petitioners; but when he saw the veteran pastor enter the house, ho sat down. A deathlike stillness ensued. The sight of the octogenarian, at a business meeting of the parish, was so novel, that nobody could tell wliat was to conic. Having asked, " What is the question now before the meeting ? " the Doctor rose, and spoke for half an hour with uncommon spri^htlincss ; exposed the absurdity of opening the house on the Sabbath far troth, and during the week for error; of building up one day, what is to be torn down the next; of weaving a web in the morning, and unravelling it at night. " This," he said, " is not what you have been taught. It is in the face of what you have heard for the lost fifty years." Ho closed his speech with a keen and sarcastic address to that "respectable class of persons called Univcrsalists." The petitioners looked at each other; feeling somewhat like tlio Indians at Hadlcy, when discomfited by the old regicide who suddenly presented himself as if from another world. As he was wont in his speeches, the Doctor stopped when he hod done. Not a sentence was spoken afterward, except to tako tho vote, and this was nearly unanimous against tho petitioners. Those who had favored a mitigation of the Doctor's strict regime, united in the general testimony that his master-piece of eloquence was in a forensic meeting, when he was about eighty-three years old; and after ho had retired from the pulpit through tear, on his own part, of failing in his extemporaneous performances.

In describing his tenociousneas of mental vigor, there is need of some qualification. Between tho ages of eighty and ninety ho retained so much of his ncuteness, that some did not perceive the least waning of his mind. It is doubtful whether there ever lived another divine whoso conversation, when in his ninety-fourth year, on an intricate point of metaphysics, would bo treated with especial deference ; yet words dropped by Emmons, in regard to a theological nicety, when he had lived twenty-thrco years beyond the prescribed ago of man, have been made tho themo of prolonged discussion. But with all his retontiveness of the excellence which ho once possessed, the old man of ninety was correct in thinking that he did not retain tho whole. Miracle, if ho did. In the vigor of his life, his abstinence from egotism was exemplary. In his waning age, he lapsed into a habit of thinking aloud concerning himself, no had become so inwardly imbued with the Edwardean doctrine of " love to being in general," and love to telf actording to the value of self, that when fourscore years had dimmed his sense of propriety, ho talked about Dr. Emmons as if Dr. Emmons were a third person. Any mistake which he had made, or injury which he had received, would be described by him as if they had no relation to him. I once asked him, " Did you erex correspond with any eminent clergymen in other lands *" " Not much," was

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