131 
him an observer. Step by step his imagination and his un- 
derstanding were unfolded, alternately and together; and 
neither at the expense of the other. The times were pro- 
pitious. The nineteenth century opened when he was but 
eight years old, the age when the brain is fully formed and fit 
to begin its work. The harvests of New England are neither 
corn nor wine nor oil, but self-reliance and independence, 
economy and energy, intelligence, high aspirations, the 
power to learn and the right to teach, insight into the worth 
of ideas, and a scorn of facts which do not submit to univer- 
sal laws, a curiosity bounded only by the limits of the possi- 
ble, and a veneration for man as man, — the master, not the 
slave, of circumstance. These were the influential forces 
which worked around our young philosopher and poet, edu- 
cating him to become the intellectual teacher of his village 
(Deerfield) at the age of twenty-two, the religious teacher 
of the church at-Conway at the age of twenty-seven, Pro- 
fessor of Chemistry and Natural History at Amherst at 
the age of thirty-two, chief of the Geological Survey of 
Massachusetts at the age of thirty-seven, Doctor of Laws 
from Harvard, and representative of American Science as 
first President of the American Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science at the age of forty-seven.. At fifty-one he 
represented both science and religion as President of Am- 
herst College, and continued to be thus one of the foremost 
men of his age for twenty years longer, until his death in 
1864. A venerable life ! 
There is something. not a little awful in exploring the 
domains of a life that is not ours. It is a labyrinth illumin- 
ated with the faintest twilight; a group of caverns to be 
surveyed with ropes and torches, haunted by romance, and 
stocked with images to which the excited imagination of 
each spectator gives some different shape. The principles, 
