668 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 357. 



ticut, but he had not ia mind the folios 

 with which the college was founded. 



If it be true that Eliot was chosen a 

 member of the Royal Society of London, 

 the distinction is very great, for only David 

 Humphreys, among Yalensians, had the 

 like honor before the recent triumvirate, 

 Dana, Newton and Gibbs. 



Of Jonathan Edwards, the philosopher 

 and theologian, I have no right to speak, 

 but he must not be exiled from men of 

 letters, especially since it is customary in 

 recent years to call him by the name of one 

 of the most illustrious of epic poets. His 

 contemporaries placed no limits on their 

 praise, and even wrote on his tombstone 

 Secundus nemini mortalium, thus transcend- 

 ing the well-known Florentian epitaph, 

 nulli aetatis suae comparandus. 



His grandson, with pardonable atavism, 

 declares that he 



in one little life the Gospel more 

 Disclosed, than all earth's myriads kenned before, 



and then, alarmed by his own eulogy, he 

 adds, "The reader will consider this prop- 

 osition as poetically strong, but not as 

 literally accurate." 



Edwards may be called a poet suppressed. 

 His writings are often noteworthy for the 

 graceful language in which refined thoughts 

 have expression, and although no rhymes 

 or verses of his are extant, some passages 

 have a Milton ic ring. The most orthodox 

 among us may hazard the opinion that his 

 visions of the future state are fitly classified 

 as works of the imagination. 



Many years ago this extraordinary man 

 was likened by Dr. Samuel Osgood, of New 

 York, to Dante, and this comparison has 

 been recently amplified in two brilliant ad- 

 dresses by Dr. Allen and Dr. Gordon in the 

 commemoration of Edwards at Northamp- 

 ton, a century and a half after his banish- 

 ment. A cooler critic has called him a 

 great glacial boulder, one of the two huge 

 literary boulders deposited in New England 



thought by the receding ice of the eighteenth 

 century. These striking terms may excite 

 a smile, but they are not uttered carelessly, 

 nor are they misfit. The logic of Edwards 

 is like a rock, fixed as those masses of stone 

 upon yonder hill where the regicides took 

 refuge, hard to move and not easily broken 

 up. Cotton Mather was his fellow traveler 

 upon the ice fields which once covered New 

 England, leaving scratches and furrows on 

 many an eminence. 



It is pleasanter to think of the flaming 

 preacher as the Dante of New England. 

 His language often glows with fire; his 

 words burn ; his fancy carries him to the 

 borders of the Inferno and to the gates of 

 Paradise. Nor is this all we can say. Our 

 Dante had his Beatrice, and the words in 

 which he speaks of her may well be placed 

 in a parallel with that which narrates the 

 love of the Italian for the daughter of 

 Folco. Hear the earliest record that has 

 come down to us of Dante's precocious and 

 enduring love. " She was perhaps eight 

 years old, very comely for her age and very 

 gentle and pleasing in her actions, with 

 ways and words more serious and modest 

 than her youth required ; and besides this, 

 with features very delicate and well formed, 

 and further so full of beauty and of sweet 

 winsomeness that she was declared by 

 many to be like an angel." '' Although a 

 mere boy, Dante received her sweet image 

 in his heart with such appreciation that 

 from that day forward it never departed 

 thence while he lived." 



Four centuries after Dante, Jonathan 

 Edwards made this note in respect to the 

 New England maiden of fourteen years, 

 who became his wife. " They say there is 

 a young lady in New Haven who is beloved 

 by that Great Being who made and rules 

 the world, and that there are certain seasons 

 in which the Great Being comes to her and 

 fills her mind with exceeding great delight. 

 * * -'^ She is of a wonderful sweetness, 



