[Illustration: ELIJAH KELLOGG AT SIXTY-FIVE. 1878.]
ELIJAH KELLOGG
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
CHAPTERS FROM HIS LIFE AND SELECTIONS
FROM HIS WRITINGS
EDITED BY
WILMOT BROOKINGS MITCHELL
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ORATORY
BOWDOIN COLLEGE
[Illustration: Colophon]
BOSTON
LEE AND SHEPARD
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY LEE AND SHEPARD.
Published, November, 1903.
_All Rights Reserved._
ELIJAH KELLOGG.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
FRANK GILMAN KELLOGG
AND
MARY CATHERINE BATCHELDER
THIS SCANTY RECORD
OF THE
LIFE AND WORK OF THEIR BELOVED FATHER
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
PREFACE
This book makes no pretence of expounding the doctrines of the
theologian or analyzing the methods of the artist. It is simply a
remembrancer of a quaint and winning man for his intimate friends and
parishioners; for the boys who have delighted in his stories; for the
sailors whose lives he saved from shipwreck; for the college students
who learned from him a wisdom not to be found in books; for all, in
fact, to whom the memory of his unique personality is dear. With the
story of his life, with anecdote and reminiscence, with selections from
his speeches, sermons, letters, and journal, it aims to recall Elijah
Kellogg as he really was: the boy, tingling with life and full of fun
to his finger tips; the college student, genial, prankish, and zealous;
the farmer-preacher, devout and resourceful, making pen and book,
scythe and hoe, seine and boat, all his ready servants to do God’s
work; the author, finding his way straight to the heart of the growing
boy; the aged man, fond as ever of the soil and the sea, and after all
the rubs and chances of a long life, still young in spirit, strong in
faith, and free from bitterness and guile.
Acknowledgment is here due to Mr. Kellogg’s son and daughter, Mr. Frank
G. Kellogg and Mrs. Mary C. Batchelder, and to many of his intimate
acquaintances in Harpswell and Brunswick for information relating
to his early Harpswell life. Special acknowledgment is also due to
President William DeWitt Hyde for valuable advice concerning the
preparation of this book.
W. B. M.
BRUNSWICK, MAINE,
November 23, 1903.
CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL CHAPTERS
PAGE
THE BOY 1
Rev. George Lewis, D.D., Pastor of Congregational
Church, South Berwick, Maine.
COLLEGE AND SEMINARY 27
Henry Leland Chapman, D.D., Professor of English Literature,
Bowdoin College.
EARLY HARPSWELL DAYS 50
Wilmot Brookings Mitchell, Professor of Rhetoric and
Oratory, Bowdoin College.
THE SEAMAN’S FRIEND 74
George Kimball, Dorchester, Mass.
AS SEEN THROUGH A BOY’S EYES 94
Judge William Oliver Clough, Nashua, N.H.
KELLOGG THE AUTHOR 115
Wilmot Brookings Mitchell.
LAST DAYS IN HARPSWELL 141
As Seen in Letters and Journal.
REMINISCENCES 169
General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, LL.D., Ex-Governor
of Maine and Ex-President of Bowdoin College.
A TRIBUTE 190
Rev. Abiel Holmes Wright, A.M., formerly Pastor of
St. Lawrence Street Church, Portland, Maine.
SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS
DECLAMATIONS:
Spartacus to the Gladiators 205
Regulus to the Carthaginians 211
Hannibal at the Altar 217
Pericles to the People 225
Icilius 229
Decius 236
Leonidas 241
The Centurion 248
Virginius to the Roman Army 254
General Gage and the Boston Boys 259
The Wrecked Pirate 265
SPEECHES:
“An Ounce of Prevention” 271
Delivered in Boston in 1861.
Religious Worship Early in the Century 276
Delivered at Portland, Maine, Centennial Celebration,
July 4, 1886.
At Bowdoin Commencement, June 25, 1890 287
At Centennial Celebration of Bowdoin College,
June 28, 1894 297
Love 306
Delivered at “Donation Party” at Harpswell, September
18, 1894.
The Deluded Hermit 310
Delivered at “Donation Party,” October 1, 1895.
Home 314
Delivered at “Donation Party,” October 19, 1897.
SERMONS:
The Prodigal’s Return 321
Wresting the Scriptures 338
The Beauty of the Autumn 357
To Bowdoin Students, October, 1889.
The Anchor of Hope 361
Preached at the Second Parish Church, Portland,
August 5, 1900, “Old Home Week.”
A Prayer 367
Memorial Day, 1883, Brunswick.
VERSE:
From “The Phantoms of the Mind” 373
The Demon of the Sea 374
Portland 378
An Ode 379
Written for the Semi-centennial Celebration at Bowdoin
College, August 31, 1852.
A Hymn 381
Written for the Celebration of the Twenty-eighth
Anniversary of the Boston Seaman’s Friend Society,
May 28, 1856.
True Poetry’s Task 382
MISCELLANEOUS:
Memories of Longfellow 387
Ben Bolt 394
Ma’am Price 404
The Discontented Brook 413
COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS 423
ILLUSTRATIONS
Elijah Kellogg at 65. 1878 _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Rev. Elijah Kellogg, 1796. Father of Elijah Kellogg.
_From a Miniature_ 8
Mrs. Eunice McLellan Kellogg. Mother of Elijah
Kellogg 28
House on Cumberland Street, Portland, Maine, in
which Elijah Kellogg lived when a boy 48
Elijah Kellogg’s Church at Harpswell, Maine 56
Hannah Pearson Pomeroy Kellogg. Wife of Elijah
Kellogg 68
Elijah Kellogg at 43. 1856 80
Elijah Kellogg’s Home at Harpswell, Maine 114
View of the Kellogg Homestead, Harpswell, Maine 140
Aunt Betsy and Uncle William Alexander, for fifty
years nearest neighbors and dear friends of Elijah
Kellogg 168
Casco Bay as seen near Kellogg Homestead, Harpswell,
Maine 188
I. Frank Gilman Kellogg. Son of Elijah Kellogg.
II. Mrs. Mary Kellogg Batchelder and Baby
Eleanor Batchelder. Daughter and granddaughter
of Elijah Kellogg 202
Elijah Kellogg at 77. 1890 288
Elijah Kellogg at 80. 1893 306
Interior View of Elijah Kellogg’s Church at Harpswell,
Maine 356
Elijah Kellogg at 86. 1899 384
ELIJAH KELLOGG: THE BOY
GEORGE LEWIS
It is much easier to read the boy after you see and know the man than
it is to read the man when you see and know only the boy. Manhood may
be the unfolding of the various forces and dispositions of boyhood,
but this unfolding must take place before the boyhood itself can be
comprehended. The mill must grind the wheat into flour and the flour
be baked and eaten before we can know how good the kernels of wheat
are. So we must see Elijah Kellogg as a man before we can fairly
estimate him as a lad. When we hear him preach or when we read some of
his books, then we know there was something in him when a child more
than mere roguery and fun. Genius was there. Powers and faculties were
there which, when trained by judgment and directed by piety, made him
the preacher to whom men and women loved to listen, and the writer of
books that captivated the hearts of all boys.
This man first saw the light May 20, 1813, in a house on Congress
Street in Portland, Maine, where dwelt the pastor of the Second
Congregational Church of the city. The baby was called Elijah because
that was the father’s name; and the father at his birth had been called
Elijah because of the famous prophet in Israel who bore the name. At
the father’s birth it was said by his parents, “We must have a prophet
in the family.” So the name Elijah was given to the boy and he proved
a prophet not in name only, but in reality as well. The Rev. Elijah
Kellogg, pastor of the Second Congregational parish in Portland during
the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth
centuries, was no mean representative of the old Hebrew prophet. The
famous name sat well and appropriately upon the younger man. Had the
Rev. Mr. Kellogg lived in the days of Ahab, of infamous memory, we may
be very sure he would have stood beside the old prophet in his stout
resistance to that wicked king; and had the Hebrew prophet been born in
New England in the eighteenth century he would have sympathized warmly
with his young namesake as he buckled on his belt and beat the drum for
the patriots at the battle of Bunker Hill, and put forth all his skill
and strength to free the colonies from the selfish and tyrannical rule
of George III. There never yet was a true prophet of God in any land
whose heart did not beat warmly for larger popular liberty and for a
higher type of righteousness. Every prophet looks toward a sunrising
that shall bring to earth a better day.
Elijah Kellogg, Sr., was but a boy at the opening of our Revolutionary
struggle, but he was a boy of high spirit, of dauntless courage, and
of most generous impulses. He derived these qualities of character
from two distinct sources. These sources were, first, his ancestry,
and second, the neighborhood where he was born, viz., South Hadley,
Massachusetts. A boy could hardly be born and reared in the atmosphere
of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, especially around Northampton
and the Hadleys at that period of time, and be anything other than a
freedom-loving patriot. It was a region of country favorable to the
growth of heroes. Settled by stanch and sturdy Puritans, its people
had for many years been sternly disciplined by the Indian troubles.
No pusillanimous and faint-hearted men could by any means live long in
that section. Only men of courage and strength could abide there. The
Kelloggs proved what stuff they were made of, for the family had been
living there for more than a century when Elijah came upon the scene.
They were there when the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, pursued by
the rancorous hatred of Charles II., sought an asylum in New England.
Those men came first to New Haven for shelter, but even there they were
not safe from the emissaries of the king. The protection, however, that
New Haven could not afford them, Hadley could. Among the steel-hearted
men of that up-river country they found safety. In that region was
an association of liberty-loving souls, which, better than woods and
better than caves, made life safe for those men who had helped behead
a faithless king and had thereby given the cause of political and
religious freedom a great uplift. Some towns are vastly better for boys
to be born in than other towns are. South Hadley was one of the “better
towns,” where Elijah Kellogg, Sr., saw the light for the first time in
the year 1761.
Furthermore, there was good blood in the Kellogg veins irrespective
of their geography. They were a worthy race anywhere and in all
circumstances. Among the ancestors of this prophet-named lad were men
who had borne the banner of the cross in Palestine with Richard of
the Lion Heart, and others who had been true and stanch men in the
Wars of the Roses and during the great reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen
Elizabeth, and still others there were who a little later for their
conscience’ sake had come to America. With such an ancestry as that
and with a birthplace like South Hadley, it is no wonder that we find
young Kellogg at Bunker Hill, where were fired the opening guns of the
Revolution; or that a little later he endured the privations of Valley
Forge and fought at Monmouth. He was, however, formed for scholarship
rather than for military life, and after the war he entered and
graduated at Dartmouth College. In 1788 the Second Church of Portland
gave him a call to their pastorate. He accepted the call, and after
this time Portland was his home as long as he lived.
Elijah Kellogg, Jr., had a good deal come to him from his father’s side
of the house. He also had a good deal come to him from his mother’s
side. This mother of his had once been Eunice McLellan. Her father
was Captain Joseph McLellan and her mother was Mary, daughter of Hugh
and Elizabeth McLellan, who had been among the earliest settlers of
Gorham, Maine. Eunice, therefore (Mrs. Kellogg), was a McLellan of the
McLellans. The family were Scotch-Irish people, and were descended
from old Sir Hugh, who was knighted in the year 1515, and the race
was one of strong family characteristics. Even at the present time
they are somewhat clannish, and to this day throughout New England the
name McLellan is regarded by him who bears it as a sort of patent of
nobility; and all agree that there are few if any names in the country
more worthy of respect and honor than that one.
Joseph McLellan was a born sailor if ever there was one, an adventurous
rover of the seas, always happiest when on blue water with a good ship
under his feet and a stiff breeze blowing him along his course. This
man sent his own disposition down the family stream, and gave to his
grandson Elijah a generous share of that same roving and adventurous
spirit. The story is told that on the birth of an infant daughter to
Joseph and Mary the parents decided to call her Esther, or as it was
pronounced in those days, Easter. The babe was taken to the church
that she might be baptized at the hands of the Rev. Mr. Deane. At the
font the name of the child was handed to the clergyman, Easter, upon
which he broke out, “Easter! Easter! That is no good name for a girl.
Call her after my wife. Call her Eunice. Eunice, I baptize thee,” etc.
The deed was done, and the child was Eunice in spite of both father
and mother. The baby thus curiously named became in due time the wife
of Parson Kellogg and the mother of the subject of this sketch. The
McLellans were a canny folk. They had fought for Scottish liberty in
many a sharp tug with the Saxons in the old days. They had helped
fight the battles of the Covenanters at a later period, and now in
the eighteenth century, transferred to America, they still kept up
the fight and played their part on many a field, from Bunker Hill to
Yorktown.
Blood will tell. Family traits will be transmitted. Sons will in some
degree resemble sires. With an ancestry on both sides like that
sketched above, it is no great wonder that the subject of this volume
became the man he did. He had a good start. There was in him a goodly
fund of inherited gifts. In the book,“Good Old Times,” which is Mr.
Kellogg’s story of the McLellan family (his grandmother’s branch of
it more particularly), the author lets us see how largely his own
personal character was formed and his whole life influenced by the
traditions and stories of the men and women of the family, recounted
as those stories were at the fireside in the winter evenings, and told
over again in the daytime as men and boys were doing their work in the
woods and in the fields. The boy was perfectly happy when listening
to these tales of pioneer life, made up as they largely were of
homely and commonplace incidents and yet of really adventurous deeds.
They were tales of conflict with the Indians, in which the McLellan
fairness and good sense always won the respect of the savages and in
most cases secured their good will and good treatment; of encounters
with bears and wolves and other wild beasts, where man’s craft and
skill gained the victory; and experiences with cold and hunger and
hardships of the wilderness, in which Christian faith and the McLellan
pluck overcame all odds and achieved a good measure of prosperity.
Things like these were the folk-lore of the Gorham people rather than
stories of round tables and fairies and ghosts and witches. This boy,
like Carlyle, came to have a great admiration for the “man who could
do things.” The ideal hero of Elijah Kellogg’s early boyhood was the
hearty, warm-hearted, rough-handed, whole-souled pioneer who never
turned his back upon a foe, whether biped or quadruped, and who never
blenched in the face of a difficulty or a danger. He was the man who
had in himself resources that were always called out and brought into
exercise when obstacles were encountered, and invariably rose superior
to the obstacles and made the man complete master of the situation,
however bad that situation appeared. As he would have phrased it, he
liked the man who never got whipped. The white man who could outwit
an Indian or outhug a bear or outrun a pack of wolves was a man to be
admired. The man who could fell a forest and clear a farm and put the
soil to the production of corn and wheat was a man to be admired. This
hero of Kellogg’s childhood was never entirely dethroned from the heart
of the man. To the end of his days he loved that man who, using his own
native strength, could bridle and ride the storm, or over the rudest
billows of the ocean could bring his vessel into port.
[Illustration: REV. ELIJAH KELLOGG. 1796.
Father of Elijah Kellogg. _From a miniature._]
It is almost superfluous to say that the man who wrote such books for
boys as are the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove series of stories was
himself, when a lad, what would be called to-day an irrepressible.
Without the least spice of malice or any suggestion of real harm in
his nature, Elijah Kellogg was as full of mischief as a spring is of
water, and it was simply impossible for parents and guardians to keep
him within the bounds of Puritan propriety. It weighed not one jot
with him that grave ministers and dignified elders of the church were
among his forbears. It never occurred to him that because his father
was a clergyman therefore he, the boy, should not go with other boys
on Sunday morning to enjoy a frolic and take a swim in the waters of
Back Cove, well out of sight from the parsonage windows, though of
course such things on the Lord’s Day were strictly forbidden. Elijah’s
proclivities were well known, and many were the family traps that were
set for his ensnarement. But he had great facility for getting out
of scrapes as well as getting into them. He did not, however, always
escape detection. On one occasion, for example, the Sunday morning
swim and games had been too fascinating for his boyish discretion, and
had held him at the water until the public services for the morning at
the church had closed. Elijah went home to meet his father, who had
missed the boy from his proper seat in the family pew. That meeting
between father and son can be more easily imagined than described,
especially if the reader happens to be the child of a stern Puritan
church-goer, and has himself been guilty of escapades on Sunday. To the
question, “Where have you been this morning?” the boy replied without
hesitation that he had been to the Methodist meeting. He heard his
father preach every Sunday, and he had become a little tired of hearing
one voice, and he wanted to hear what some other man had to say. Of
course the next question was, “What was the preacher’s text?” Elijah
was ready for this and at once gave chapter and verse and repeated
the passage. But the inquisition did not stop here; he must now give
some account of the sermon. This seemed a perfectly easy matter to the
young culprit. He had heard a good many sermons, and he felt very sure
that he could report one even though he had not listened to it at all.
But here he was caught. He had never heard anything but the rigid,
old-school, Calvinistic doctrines, and it never entered his head that
one minister did not always preach like another. It was therefore a
sound Calvinistic sermon that this young reporter put into the mouth of
the Methodist minister. He was soon brought up short with the paternal
remark: “Elijah, stop right there. Now I know you are lying. No
Methodist minister ever preached like that. Your whole story is false.
You have spent your morning down by the water.”
When Elijah was some ten or eleven years old he was taken to Gorham,
and spent some months in the home of Mrs. Lothrop Lewis. Mrs. Lewis
had a young daughter whom she wished put into a Portland school, and
an exchange of children was made with the Kelloggs, they taking the
girl into their home and Mrs. Lewis taking the boy into hers. This
exchange was in many respects a grateful one to the boy. The country
was the place for him. There was more freedom there, more room and
more chance for fun than in town. Perhaps, too, the fact that his
father was nine miles away had its alleviations, for the presence of
a father, however dearly he was loved, was a damper on the spirit of
prankishness. While with Mrs. Lewis, Elijah certainly made mischief
for everybody, but at the same time he made friends of everybody, for
none could help loving the bright and lively fellow. In due time the
boy went back to Portland. But the city was no place for a lad like
him. He chafed under its restraints, and cared but little for its
schools. He was like a sea-gull shut up in a cage. As the imprisoned
gull pines for the freedom of wind and wave so did the heart of Elijah
Kellogg long for the free winds and the rolling waters and the ships
that went sailing away to distant ports. It was a longing that could
not be suppressed, and no one can really blame him that before he was
thirteen years old he had found his way on board a ship and become
a sailor in downright earnest. I am sure that the boys who read his
books are not sorry that the hand that wrote those stories gained some
of its cunning by pulling ropes, furling and unfurling sails, taking
his trick at the wheel, and sharing actively in whatever pertained
to the handling and management of vessels. He loved the sea, and was
fascinated by the strange sights and sounds of foreign countries. He
was a keen observer for a boy just entering his teens, and he gained
much valuable knowledge as he wandered round the world borne along by
the wings of a ship. But in his roving he never for one moment forgot
his home. His heart was warm and true to the friends who were there.
Letters written to his father from different quarters of the world are
now in existence, and they bear full testimony to his ardent affection
for home and friends. His love for friends was perhaps the strongest
element of his nature, even stronger than his love of adventure, and in
due time that love brought him back from his travels no longer to sail
the seas except in small boats near the shore. In the story of “Charlie
Bell,” Mr. Kellogg (unconsciously, no doubt) has given us the picture
of a boy’s nature and disposition very much like his own.
After returning from sea Elijah found Portland and Portland ways no
more congenial to him than they had been before he went away, and
again he left home and went to Gorham to try life among his McLellan
relatives. He lived for a time in the family of Major Warren on a farm
some two miles out of the village, matching his own strength of muscle
with that of the regular farm-hands. He was not there a great while,
however. Rev. Mr. Kellogg came out from Portland and interviewed Mr.
Alexander McLellan, a near relative of his own wife, and the result
of that interview was that Elijah was, after the fashion of the time,
indentured as an apprentice to Mr. McLellan to do general work on
the place for the period of one year. The purpose of this indenture,
however, was rather to restrain and hold him in one stated place than
to make a servant of him, for he became at once a true member of the
family “in good and regular standing.” He took his position and did
his share of the work on the place in a faithful and orderly manner.
His experience on the ship had been of great benefit to him. He had
there learned the lessons of obedience and of industry,--lessons
absolutely essential for every boy to learn if he would ever arrive
at a worthy maturity. Now, instead of blocks and ropes and belaying
pins, his tools were the plough, the hoe, the scythe, and the axe, and
while using these he could almost fancy himself a pioneer. All this
was a very wholesome kind of life and a right life in its way. Still
it was no proper life for such a young man as by this time Elijah
Kellogg had become. All his friends seemed to feel the incongruity of
it, and the truth of this began to dawn upon himself, also. He began
to feel, and to feel very strongly, that this sort of life was not
up to his own level. The bird is for a life higher than the ground,
and in like manner he was for something higher than the farm. There
was a real genius in the soul of this boy that was reaching up toward
intellectual exercises. Decks of ships, fields of corn, loads of
lumber, were all good, but for him there was something better. The play
of intellect appealed to him now more than the play of muscle did. All
the associations in the family where he lived and those throughout the
village were such as to encourage and foster this new ambition. This
new feeling, this new ideal which was fast taking possession of his
mind, was only an indication that the doors of boyhood were closing
and the doors of manhood were beginning to open. He was gradually
coming to understand himself and to have a dawning perception of
some God-given powers, which, if they were properly trained, might
result in the accomplishment of fine things. This vision of what he
might sometime perform, if he would, rose to the front, and for the
time assumed the leadership of his life. He was as obedient to this
vision as Saint Paul was obedient to the vision he had near the city
of Damascus, or as Abraham Lincoln was obedient to those dreams and
visions that he had while he was managing the flatboat on the great
river. The McLellan family, where he was living, were heartily in
sympathy with this new development. From oldest to youngest they all
felt that it was not a proper thing that this young man who was so
gifted and who showed so many marks of a true genius should spend his
energies on the farm and in the shop. There is iron for the place of
iron and steel for the place of steel and silver for that of silver.
This was a piece of silver, and he ought to take his proper place. It
is needless to say how much this _change of aim_ on the part of Elijah
gladdened the heart of his own father. It was indeed a day of general
thanksgiving when this young man put himself in the way of a higher
intellectual development and entered Gorham Academy as one of its
students. This was one of the best academies in the country at that
day. Its presiding genius was Master Nason who was known far and wide,
not only as one who could keep rude boys in subjection to school rules
by a liberal use of the birch, but as one who possessed faculty and
power to stir the minds of pupils and impart to them rich stores of
knowledge. New England has seen few instructors equal to Master Nason.
The names of boys whom, in the old Academy at Gorham, he fitted for
college, have in several instances become known all over the country,
and some are known round the world. The Academy is proud of its roll of
graduates, and those who studied under Mr. Nason have always been proud
of their teacher.
Young Kellogg now put himself squarely down to hard work. He was older
than are most boys when they take up the higher branches of study and
begin to point their way definitely toward college, and he studied
and worked in the Academy like one who is trying to make up for lost
time. Such an intensity of application to books as was his at this
time would have broken down many students; but Kellogg had a rare stock
of good health and physical strength. He could well stand the strain
of hard study. He had a well-knit frame. He never forgot how much of
his own power of endurance he derived from his sturdy habits of toil
in field and forest. He never forgot what a good physical basis for
intellectual work manual labor gives one. In one of the college boys of
his creation in the Whispering Pine series of books--Henry Morton--he
shows the close connection between that young man’s hoe and axe and his
leadership of the college class. When Mr. Kellogg did this, he knew
very well what he was talking about. Seventy years ago these things
largely took the place of the athletic field of our time, and they
filled that place very well, too. An old fogy may perhaps be pardoned
for saying that in spite of all the excitement and glory of base-ball
and foot-ball and running and leaping and boating, still the oil of hoe
handle has its virtues as a medicine for students.
The life of young Kellogg shows distinctly two points of turning. The
first one was when he wakened to the consciousness of his mental
powers; when he realized something of what he was and determined that
he would live on the high level of his intellectual self. A young horse
that has in him the elements of speed to win a race on the track is
trained for the track. The horse of great weight is put into the truck
team. Animals are put in training, according to what they are. When
Kellogg realized something of his own intellectual power, then he put
himself in training for an intellectual life. He therefore went into
the Academy that he might fit for college. After he had begun work in
the Academy there came to him another consideration, and he asked the
question: “Is a life of mere scholarship the highest and best one of
which I am capable?” He felt surely that he ought to live up to the
level of his mind, but he began to feel that there was some power in
himself superior to that of brains and that that higher power should be
developed and his own life should be devoted to that which was supreme.
He felt strongly that he should not allow the spiritual element of his
nature to lie dormant or go to waste. The diamond that is not ground on
the wheel is just as hard as the one that is ground, but it does not
sparkle and flash like the one on which the lapidary has spent his
skill. The uncut diamond is like the man who stops in the classical
school and does not care for the infinitely finer work that religion
does for him. Mr. Kellogg felt that it was not enough for him to have
power. The power that was in him should be dedicated to the divinest
ends. It should be religiously dedicated and consecrated. This was
the second turning of his life, and when it was made he had become an
earnest and devoted Christian. He understood Christianity to mean that
he should employ the faculties and powers of his own nature in helping
other people to lead better and more wholesome lives. Christianity
meant more than self-culture; it meant self-giving. If there was in
himself (as there certainly was) a large element of fun, this was by no
means to be suppressed or sent into eclipse. Religion would not maim
him that way any more than religion would clip the wings of a robin and
make a mole of the bird. But religion would take that spirit of fun
and cause it to play and shine and work for the production of purer
thinking and cleaner living and higher aiming among all young people.
It was in obedience to this new spirit that Elijah went to work at
once outside of the Academy as well as in it, and he then started some
streams of religious influence that have by no means ceased running
even to this day. Among the things he did at this period was to go
into a certain neighborhood not many miles from Gorham and start a
Sunday-school. It seems easy enough to _say_ that the young man went
into a certain place and organized a Sunday-school, but from all
accounts it was by no means an easy or even a safe thing for that young
man to do. Three score and odd years ago--long before the days of Neal
Dow and the Maine Law--there were certain regions here and there in
the State where those people who were ignorant and given to drink and
other forms of vice were sure to congregate like birds of ill omen, and
there would be a neighborhood from which respectable people would keep
away. Such a community was a multiplied Ishmael whose hand was against
every man and every man’s hand against it. On one of these disreputable
districts Elijah’s attention became fixed. With two or three of the
people who lived there he had in some way become acquainted, and he
“felt a call” to preach in that place. But even Elijah Kellogg, young,
brave, and stout-hearted as he was, shrank from going there alone with
an invitation to a Sunday-school to be sent abroad among that class of
folk. He feared what might come from such a movement, and wished for a
companion to share his fortunes. He appealed to a young friend, George
L. Prentiss, afterward for many years an honored professor in Union
Theological Seminary in New York, to go with him. But the response
of Prentiss to this request was not favorable. “No, Elijah,” was his
word,“I don’t dare to go down there. They will kill us if we do.” Then
after a moment’s pause, “I’ll tell you what I will do. If you go down
there and start a Sunday-school and don’t get killed, I’ll come in
later and help you.” But Elijah had set his heart on doing the bit of
work, and was not to be scared out of it. He started on his mission
alone, and I doubt if Judson on his way to India, or Livingstone
going to Africa, did a more heroic thing than that. He did start a
Sunday-school, and he did get the people interested in both himself and
his school, and through his influence the community was transformed,
and to-day the descendants of those people are an intelligent,
God-fearing, church-going, high-minded class of citizens, and they
are such because of Mr. Kellogg. He never forgot them, and they never
forgot him. The writer of this article was present in company with
Mr. Kellogg at the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of that
school. The season was mid-summer. The day was Sunday. The place was
the church. The audience was everybody who lived in the district,
supplemented by a large number who had driven thither from Portland,
Westbrook, Gorham, Scarboro, and Saco. The larger share of those who
had gathered were not able to get inside the church, but they crowded
as close to the wide open windows as possible and heard what they
could. After brief introductory exercises, Mr. Kellogg preached a most
beautiful and touching sermon of some twenty minutes’ length. Then
the Bible was closed, and a period of story-telling began. There were
present some four or five persons who remembered the “first day of
school” fifty years before. They all talked. Reminiscences were called
up, old scenes revived, old stories told, old experiences related, and
the old time was contrasted with the new. It was all of it immensely
funny. Sometimes it was crying, but a good deal more it was laughing.
My own feeling at the moment was that it was fortunate the windows were
open, for otherwise the house must have burst. I do not think there
ever was another church than that since churches were built where was
heard so much laughter and manifested so much fun and wit on Sunday.
Mr. Kellogg got through with the Academy, and entered Bowdoin College
in 1836. It is worthy of note that in all his long life he never
shuffled off the boy. It was not a mere memory on his part that he once
was a boy. The genuine boy was never a memory with him, but was always
a present reality. In one sense he was as young at eighty as he was at
eighteen. Boys were his mates always. There are men who, like Oliver
Wendell Holmes, never grow old, and Mr. Kellogg was one of them. To
the very last his lips would smile and his eyes would twinkle as he
recalled some prank of his boyhood or told tales of those who had been
his companions on the ship and on the farm and in the school. He never
forgot a friend, and he certainly never forgot a funny or laughable
incident. His own perennial boyhood has cheered and made more noble an
almost numberless band of young lives throughout the country, and may
the time be long before the young people of the land shall cease to
read his wholesome books.
COLLEGE AND SEMINARY
HENRY LELAND CHAPMAN
It was in 1836, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, that Elijah
Kellogg entered Bowdoin College as a Freshman. His father had been
one of the earliest and firmest friends of the college. As one of
the Cumberland County Association of Ministers he had joined in the
petition to the General Court of Massachusetts for the establishment
of a collegiate institution in the province of Maine. When in answer
to the petition of the ministers, and of the Court of Sessions of
Cumberland County, the college was incorporated in 1794, Mr. Kellogg
was named as one of the first board of overseers. Four years later
he became a trustee, and continued to hold that official relation to
the college until 1824. During his boyhood, therefore, and before he
cherished any purpose or desire to enjoy its privileges, Elijah must
have heard, within the family circle, much about the college which
was so great an object of interest and pride to his father, as it
was, indeed, to the whole community. It was but natural, therefore,
when his purpose was seriously formed to seek a college training in
preparation for his father’s calling of the ministry, that Bowdoin,
aside from its proximity to his home, should be the college of his
choice. But his course collegeward was interrupted and delayed by
various circumstances, and particularly by personal tastes that were
quite other than scholastic. Always a lover of the sea, and delighting
in the tales of sea life and adventure to which he listened from the
lips of sailors themselves along the Portland wharves, it is not
strange that the call of the sea sounded louder than any other in his
ears. So, listening to the call, he shipped before the mast, and for
three years lived the hard and perilous life of a sailor. It is true
that the experience, which may have been useful to him in other ways
also, was an admirable preparation for the brilliant service which he
afterwards performed as chaplain of the Sailor’s Home in Boston, but in
the meantime it made him late in entering upon his college life. It is
to be said, however, that of his thirty classmates six were as old
as himself.
[Illustration: MRS. EUNICE MCCLELLAN KELLOGG.
Mother of Elijah Kellogg.]
We must look to certain volumes of the Whispering Pines series, and
particularly to the volumes entitled “The Spark of Genius,” “The
Sophomores of Radcliffe,” and “The Whispering Pine,” for a picture
of his college life, true in its general features, and graphic like
everything from Mr. Kellogg’s pen. These books, which have been read
with eager interest by so many generations of boys, describe Bowdoin
College, its professors, students, customs, and manners as they were
known to Elijah Kellogg during the years of his residence there from
1836 to 1840. If they seem to be devoted largely to a recital of pranks
and mischief and practical jokes among the students, it is partly
because such things made a stronger appeal to scheming brains, and
youthful fellowship, and leisure hours in those days, before athletic
sports enlisted, as they have since enlisted, the restless energy and
high spirits and intense rivalry of college boys; and partly, also, it
was because his native sense of humor and love of fun, his spirit of
adventure and personal courage, constituted an ever present temptation
to him to share or lead in enterprises which demanded wariness and
cunning and pluck, and which promised the discomfiture of some boastful
and unloved fellow-student, or the perplexed disapproval of the college
authorities, or the entertainment of a college community always keenly
appreciative of a diverting sensation. So alive was he to this phase
of student activity, and so conspicuous was he among his mates for
resourcefulness and courage, that he became, in the popular opinion of
his time and in subsequent tradition, the hero of many an escapade with
which he had no connection. One instance, however, of strenuous effort
quite outside his college duties seems to be well authenticated, and
will serve to show the kind of mischievous exploit which was attractive
enough to enlist his cooperation.
The president of the college during the first three years of Kellogg’s
course was a man of great dignity and reserve. He held himself quite
aloof from the students, neither inviting nor allowing any freedom of
social intercourse. Partly on this account he was unpopular with the
student body, and the solemn reserve in which he intrenched himself
seemed, in their eyes, to make any infringement, however slight, of
his personal dignity particularly humorous. There was much irreverent
laughter, therefore, when it was whispered about on one occasion that
the silk hat which the president was accustomed to wear, and which
seemed the very crown and symbol of his formal stateliness, had been
stolen, and was in the hands of some of the students. When it came
to the ears of Kellogg he remarked that if he knew the boys that had
the hat he would put it on the top of the chapel spire. Of course the
interesting information was not long withheld from him, and in the
darkness of a showery night he climbed sturdily up by the slender
and insecure pathway of the lightning-rod, and placed the hat on the
very top, where, in the morning, it met the dismayed vision of the
president, and received the boisterous salutations of the college.
That was Kellogg’s contribution to the deed of mischief. To steal the
hat was a petty and foolish trick, such as might be perpetrated by a
half-witted person, a coward, or a thief; but to carry it through the
darkness to the top of the chapel spire required a clear head, a stout
heart, good muscle, and nerve, and these Elijah Kellogg possessed, both
in youth and manhood.
In reading these books, which tell the substantial history of his life
at Bowdoin, it is quite evident that, with all the interest he took
in the pastimes and pranks of his associates, he was not unmindful
of the high and serious purpose of a college course. He maintained a
consistent ideal of personal integrity and helpfulness and truth. It
is the repeated testimony of those who were in college with him that
his influence upon his fellow-students was in a high degree stimulating
and wholesome. “He was,” says one who knew him well in the intimacy of
college association, “universally popular, but he had his own chosen
favorites, and one characteristic of him was his strong personal
affection for them. His soul burned with love to those whom he loved.
This was one secret of his power for good, for his influence upon them
was always good.” An unaffected scorn of what was mean or false, and an
eagerness to recognize and to make the most of every good and generous
trait in his companions, were as characteristic of him as was his
light-hearted, fun-loving disposition, and it is easy to see why he won
both the respect and love of those who were admitted to his friendship.
These engaging qualities of his youth were no less those of his age,
and they made him throughout life the friend of boys and the favorite
of boys. He never lost the spirit of sympathy and comradeship with
young men, and as his home, during the later years of his life, was
not far from the college that he loved, he had a double motive to
revisit, from time to time, the scene of those labors and frolics and
friendships which he had so charmingly depicted in the Whispering
Pine books. Accordingly he presented himself, now and then, either
unexpectedly or upon invitation, at the door of some undergraduate
member of his college fraternity, the Alpha Delta Phi, and became, for
as long as he would stay, a welcome and honored guest.
It did not take long for the news to spread that Elijah Kellogg was
in college; and then the hospitable room would be visited by many
callers, eager to greet the shy, weather-beaten little man, whose heart
was always warm for boys, and even the mazy wrinkles of whose face
seemed to speak less of age than of kindness. And by the evening lamp
an interested circle of students forgot the morrow’s lessons as they
listened to stories of olden time, and to quaint words of counsel and
comment as they fell from the visitor’s lips. When the circle finally
dissolved, and Mr. Kellogg and his entertainers were left alone, a
psalm, which seemed somehow to gain new meaning from his reading of it,
and a simple earnest prayer, brought the long evening to a fitting and
memorable close.
It is interesting, moreover, to notice, as an evidence of the profound
regard and affection which the Bowdoin students felt for Mr. Kellogg,
that when, in 1901, they published a volume of Bowdoin tales, no other
dedication of the book was thought of than the one which inscribes
it to the memory of Elijah Kellogg, “who celebrated his Alma Mater
in story, honored her by practical piety, and won the hearts of her
boys, his brethren.” If he was not eminent in the prescribed studies
of the college, neither was he neglectful of them, nor unfaithful to
them. Perhaps his enjoyment of college fellowships and his love of
fun interfered to some extent with his devotion to the classics and
mathematics, which made up a large part of the curriculum, and, in
addition, the necessity under which he lay of providing for his own
expenses must have diverted a part of his energies from study to
manual toil. But whether at work, at play, or at study, he was hearty
and resourceful. An incident, as told by himself, illustrates this
trait of his character, and, incidentally, introduces the president
whose sombre dignity provoked the stealing and subsequent disposal of
his hat, as already related.
“I had to work my way through college,” said Mr. Kellogg, “and I
boarded with a woman named Susan Dunning. I came to her house one
Saturday. There was a deep snow on the ground, and college was to open
Monday. She was feeling very blue because her well-sweep had broken.
I told her not to mind, I’d fix it. The snow was too deep to get the
cattle out, so I took a sled, and going to a wood-lot cut a big, heavy
pole, it took a big one, too, for an old well-sweep. I put it on the
sled, and tried to haul it back; but the long end dragging in the deep
snow made that impossible. So, instead of hauling it, I took hold of
the end and started pushing it home. It was hard work, but to make it
worse President Allen met me and remarked, ‘Well, Kellogg, I have heard
of putting the cart before the horse, but I never saw it done before;’
then he burst into a hearty laugh, and that’s the only time I ever saw
him even smile in all the years I knew him.”
Besides President Allen, who was a man of learning and piety, as well
as soberness, and whose single laugh, as chronicled by Mr. Kellogg, may
perhaps be extenuated on the ground that it was indulged in before the
term began, it was a notable group of men under whose influence and
instruction Mr. Kellogg came during his residence at Bowdoin. There was
Professor Alpheus S. Packard, whose elegant culture and kindly heart
and beautiful face relieved the tedium of the Greek class-room, and
impressed themselves upon the grateful memories of not less than sixty
classes of Bowdoin students. There was Professor Thomas C. Upham, the
quaint and shy philosopher, who had in himself so much of the mystic
and seer combined with the patient metaphysical analyst that it sent
him from time to time into bursts of religious song, and assured his
name an honored place among the hymn-writers as well as among the
philosophers. There was Professor Samuel P. Newman, who, by precept
and criticism, imparted as much as can be imparted of the art of
rhetoric, in which Mr. Kellogg was to become so much of a proficient.
There was Professor William Smyth, rugged, impetuous, and true, an
apostle of abolition, an enthusiastic champion of popular education
and, indeed, of every good cause, and, above all, a profound and famous
mathematician, about whom Mr. Kellogg relates the somewhat apocryphal
story of the “Mathematician in Shafts,” not, as may be seen, to suggest
ridicule, but in a sort of fond and amused recognition of his unique
and vigorous personality. And finally, not to make the catalogue too
long, there was Professor Parker Cleaveland, the distinguished scholar
and teacher of chemistry and mineralogy, and a man of idiosyncrasies as
striking as were his gifts. In a beautiful memorial sonnet Longfellow
said of him:--
“Among the many lives that I have known
None I remember more serene and sweet,
More rounded in itself, and more complete.”
“From Seniors to Freshmen,” says Mr. Kellogg, “all believed in, loved,
and were proud of the reputation of the scholarly, kind-hearted,
democratic, and, at times, compassionate professor.” And at the
close of the chapter which is devoted to illustrations of Professor
Cleaveland’s eccentric ways and beneficent influence, Mr. Kellogg is
moved to this earnest and affectionate expression of his reverence:
“Blessings on thy memory, faithful one,--faithful even unto death,--to
whom was committed the gift to stir young hearts to noble enterprise
and manly effort; who knew how to train the youthful eye to look upon,
and the heart to pant after, the goal thou hadst reached! Those most
amused with thy peculiarities loved thee best. From hence removed to
the presence and enjoyment of Him whose wisdom, power, and goodness,
manifested in the material world, thou to us didst so worthily explain
and illustrate, we shall behold thy form and press thy hand no more;
but only with life shall we surrender the memory of him who united the
attributes of both teacher and friend.”