without making it something of an autobiography. Friends can
always read a personal history, or guess at it, between the
lines. So I sometimes think I have already written mine, in my
verses. In them, I have found the most natural and free
expression of myself. They have seemed to set my life to music
for me, a life that has always had to be occupied with many
things besides writing. Not, however, that I claim to have
written much poetry: only perhaps some true rhymes: I do not see
how there could be any pleasure in writing insincere ones.

Whatever special interest this little narrative of mine may have
is due to the social influences under which I was reared, and
particularly to the prominent place held by both work and
religion in New England half a century ago. The period of my
growing-up had peculiarities which our future history can never
repeat, although something far better is undoubtedly already
resulting thence. Those peculiarities were the natural de-
velopment of the seed sown by our sturdy Puritan ancestry. The
religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a
mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked
up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half
revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so
that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky, than our
elders; but the tree was sound at its heart. There was life in it
that can never be lost to the world.

One thing we are at last beginning to understand, which our
ancestors evidently had not learned; that it is far more needful
for theologians to become as little children, than for little
children to become theologians. They considered it a duty that