HKB
great gathering, Dr. Emerson, editor of the "Christian Leader," presents the following description of the birthplace of Mr. Ballou. We are glad to give it a place in this volume:--
"Stratford-upon-Avon has its one interest for the great world in the happy fortune of giving to every age the Bard who, in the faculty for putting an almost inspired wisdom into verse that is not simply matchless, but at a vast altitude above that of every other poet who has spoken the Saxon tongue,--William Shakespeare. The little town of Ayr would be nothing but a Scottish post-village but for the circumstance that Robert Burns first breathed within its borders. But first Stratford and then Ayr, for the English-speaking world, rise to an importance simply unique, above every hamlet upon the British Isles, London and Edinburgh hardly excepted.
"Those who with us fully believe that the future is to honor Hosea Ballou with a niche in the temple of fame, as the peer of the elder Edwards, and as hardly the second of Franklin, who find in the 'Treatise on the Atonement' the quarry where Bushnell has polished a few boulders, will further agree with us that the gazetteer of the coming century will put into conspicuous type, and honor with some detail of description, the New Hampshire farming town where Hosea Ballou was born. The compiler of Lippincott's did not know its claim to distinction, when he summarily disposed of Richmond, N. H., as 'a post-township in Cheshire Co., 53 miles S. W. of Concord.'
"In a recent attendance upon the grove meeting, not the least among the inducements to make the journey was the opportunity to see the homestead where Hosea Ballou first took the breath of life, and to explore some of the vales and hills his boy feet must have trod more than a century ago.... As we enter this little village, a church at our right, half a century old, is the Universalist church,--the members of which have nearly all left, to be good parishioners at Winchester, Keene, and other more thriving and distant neighborhoods.
"A little farther on, at our left, is a 'meeting-house,'--it is true to that classic cognomen. It is black with age. It seems hardly strong enough to keep timber, board, and shingle together. It cannot be less than a century and a half old. The very sight of it takes us back to a former and very primitive age. The glass is held to the sash by bits of tin,--the putty got tired long ago and 'let go.' We cannot enter, but we can look through the windows. On the north side is the great, square pine pulpit, possibly one that never knew the smell of paint. The square pews have high seats from which only tolerably long limbs can touch the knotty floor. There is no grace of form, no cunning device of architect, nothing to woo a trained fancy. In and of itself, it is a hulk that only cumbers the ground.
"Why, then, did we look often, long, and spell-bound upon this wretched old rookery, and see therein a fascination not to be noted in the Capitol at Albany or the mammoth and costly post-offices of New York and Boston? The answer is in the history. More than a century ago, Rev. Maturin Ballou preached regularly from that pine pulpit. Among the regular auditors, possibly the most thoughtful of them all, his little legs dangling from the rough benches, sat his little son--Hosea.