CORRESPONDENCE. 29 



MEMBERS OF THE ESSEX INSTITUTE, FRIENDS AND FELLOW-TOWNS- 

 MEN: 



I am very sorry that I cannot be with you in person ; if 

 I had been, I should have tried to say to you what I am now saying 

 from this paper. 



I can only hope that this expression of my feeling of love, grati- 

 tude and veneration, even though I contribute nothing new towards 

 a proper and full estimate of the man, his life, his spirit and his 

 writings,- will in some way help to make more vivid the general 

 reflection of his peculiar personality, even as every, the least, drop 

 of the dew or of the ocean goes to intensify the glow of the sun's 

 imaged light. 



Of Jones Very's boyhood and school-days I have no special remi- 

 niscences. I recall only his quiet and dignified demeanor, his slender 

 figure, a kind of emblem of uprightness, his sweet smile, and in gen- 

 eral the respect and esteem with which he inspired his companions. 

 I remember how he looked far better than what he said. During my 

 college life, I began to see the initials J. V. affixed to pieces of 

 poetry in our Salem papers, such as the lines to my old favorite "The 

 Columbine," and particularly was I impressed with his majestic hymHi 

 at the dedication of our new stone church on Essex street. Mean- 

 while those wonderful sonnets of his had begun to make their appear- 

 ance, than which it seemed to me and does still, that nothing finer in 

 that department (or at least in this special portion of it) had been 

 done by any writer in our language, and which seemed to me to place 

 Very as a sonneteer up by the side of Wordsworth, Keats, Blanco 

 White, Elizabeth Browning, and Shakespeare. 



About this time (I am now speaking of the very last part of my 

 Cambridge life when I was a Divinity student, and Very was an 

 undergraduate), I used to hear of the peculiar friendship Professor 

 Channing had for him, and of the long and earnest discussions they 

 had about Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, as darkly revealing 

 Shakespeare's personality, which Jones was then trying so hard to 

 express, and of which he has embodied his idea in one of the essays 

 of the little volume of prose and verse 'that came out under the 

 supervision of some admiring friends in 1839. 



After this time, having taken up ray abode as preacher in another 

 state, I used to meet Very only rarely, not always once in a year, 

 when I visited my native place, but when I met him, the first thing 

 that impressed me was always that peculiar sweet smile which I 

 remembered of old. Now and then I enjoyed a walk with him, which, 

 by his leading, would always be to the pastures. Of his conversation 

 at such times, what I remember the most prominently, is the way in 

 which he would stop, after expressing some thought about nature, 

 man or God, that he seemed to fear might appear commonplace from 



