244 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



manly and eloquent voice sounding forth its stirring utterances 

 with all the strange and fitful cadence of a music quite peculiar to it- 

 self. The many-sidedness of the man, and the unconventional charac- 

 ter of his prelections, combine to make it exceedingly difficult to give 

 any full analysis of his course, or to define the nature and grounds 

 of his wonderful power as a lecturer. I am certain that if every 

 student who ever attended his class were to place on record his im- 

 pressions of these, the impressions of each student would be widely 

 different, and yet they would not, taken all together, exhaust the 

 subject, or supply a complete representation either of his matter or 

 his manner. There was so much in the look and tone, in every as- 

 pect and in every movement of the man, which touched and swayed 

 the student at the time, but which cannot now be recalled, described, 

 or even realized, that any reminiscence by any one can be interest- 

 ing only to those whose memories of the same scenes enable them 

 to follow out the train of recollection, or complete the picture which 

 it may suggest. 



"I attended his class in session 1837-8. It was the session im- 

 mediately succeeding the loss of his wife, the thought of which, as 

 it was ever again and again re-awakened in his mind by allusions in 

 his lectures, however remote, to such topics as death, bereavement, 

 widowhood, youthful love, domestic scenes, and, above all, to con- 

 jugal happiness, again and again shook his great soul with an agony 

 of uncontrollable grief, the sight of which was sufficient to subdue 

 ns all into deep and respectful sympathy with him. On such occa- 

 sions he would pause for a moment or two in his lecture, fling him- 

 self forward on the desk, bury his face in his hands, and while his 

 whole frame heaved with visible emotion, he would weep and sob 

 like a very child. 



" The roll of papers on which each lecture was written, which he 

 carried into the class-room firmly grasped in his hand, and suddenly 

 unrolled and spread out on the desk before him, commencing to 

 read the same moment, could not fail to attract the notice of any 

 stranger in his class-room. It was composed in large measure of 

 portions of old letters— the addresses and postage-marks on which 

 could be easily seen as he turned the leaf, yet it was equally evi- 

 dent that the writing was neat, careful, and distinct ; and, except 

 in a more than usually dark and murk day, it was read with perfect 

 ease and fluency. 



