4^6 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE. \}^^l 



diffusing blessings the extent of which it is hard to exaggerate. 

 Look at his labors in the pulpit for fifty years, and that great 

 series of sermons — making a cycle of Christian duty — which we 

 give in our preceding pages.* What a body of texts; what a field 

 cf thought to traverse ! See him ever ready to devote his splendid 

 powers to any cause in which he could subserve the interests of 

 humanity. He was the founder of the American Philosophical 

 Society, though Franklin, who was not in the country then, nor 

 for years afterwards, got the credit of it. An astronomer, a clas- 

 sical scholar, a statesman, an orator. How various his powers ! 

 how high his accomplishments ! 



Of his labors in the councils of the church how can we speak 

 too highly? During much of the Provincial epoch he was its 

 one great character. To him more than to any other person, nay, 

 more than to all other persons in the Province, Pennsylvania owes 

 its deserved reputation for the sound, learned and pious clergy 

 which, unlike Virginia and some other States, it had before the 

 Revolution. And after the peace of 1783 no man but William 

 White — he the fruit of Dr. Smith's training from his scvcntli year 

 till his seventeenth — stands before or, in point of splendid accom- 

 plishments, near him. In the work of internal improvements in 

 Pennsylvania he was a pioneer. This State owes to his memory 

 a debt, with large arrears of interest, which she has never thought 

 of and will never discharge. 



Of the University of Pennsylvania, now becoming a seat of 

 learning which may rank with the colleges of "Oxford" and of 

 Washington College, Maryland, to whose history " Ipswich" would 

 afford an unjust similitude, what shall I say ? How naturally the 

 poet's words flow from my pen : 



Ever witness for him 

 Those twins of learning that he raised in you ! 



One of which fell with him, 

 Unwilling to outlive the good that did it; 

 The other, though unfinished, yet so famous, 

 So excellent in art, and still so rising 

 That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue. 



* Pages 432-442. 



