that experience. He tells us that during those happy years of his first
marriage he had proposed to himself a change from the legal profession
to the ministry. By a second marriage, December 6, 1615, to Thomasine
Clopton, of a good family in the neighborhood, he had the promise of
renewed joy in a condition which his warm-hearted sociability and his
intense fondness for domestic relations made essential to his happiness,
if not to his virtue. But one single year and one added day saw her and
her infant child committed to the tomb, and made him again desolate. His
biographer, not without misgivings indeed, but with a deliberation and
healthfulness of judgment which most of his readers will approve as
allowed to overrule them, has spread before us at length, from the most
sacred privacy of the stricken mourner, heart-exercises and scenes in
the death-chamber, such as engage with most painful, but still
entrancing sympathy, the very soul of the reader. We know not where, in
all our literature, to find matter like this, so bedewed and steeped in
tenderness, so swift in its alternations between lacerating details and
soothing suggestions. The author has put into print all that remains of
the record of John Winthrop's "Experience," in passages written
contemporaneously with its incidents,--a document distinct from the
record of his "Christian Experience," written here. The account of
Thomasine's death-bed exercises, as deciphered from the perishing
manuscript, must, we think, stand by itself, either for criticism, or
for the defiance of criticism. What we have had of similar scenes only
in fragments, and as seen though veils, is here in the fulness of all
that can harrow or comfort the human heart, spread before us clear of
any withholding. It was the same year in which Shakspeare died, in a
house built by Sir Hugh Clopton, a member of the same family-connection
with Thomasine. Hour by hour, almost minute by minute, the stages of her
transition are reported with infinite minuteness. Her own prayers, and
those of a steady succession of religious friends, are noted; the