EARLY ENVIRONMENT
The Family Circle. An Unusual Mother. What She Read Her Children. A
Preacher at Three Years of Age.
Such was the heritage and the home into which Russell H. Conwell
was born February 15, 1843. Think what a world his eyes opened
upon--"fair, searching eyes of youth"--steadfast hills holding mystery
and fascination in green depths and purple distances, streams rushing
with noisy joy over stony beds, sweet violet gloom of night with
brilliant stars moving silently across infinite space; tender moss,
delicate fern, creeping vine, covering the brown earth with living
beauty--a fascinating world of loveliness for boyish eyes to look upon
and wonder about.
The home inside was as unpretentious as its exterior suggested. The
tiny hall admitted on one side to a bedroom, on the other to a living
room, from which opened a room used as a store. Above was an attic.
The living room was the bright, cheery heart of the house. The morning
sun poured in through two windows which faced the east; a window and
door on the south claimed the same cheery rays as the sun journeyed
westward. The big open fireplace made a glowing spot of brightness.
The floor was uncarpeted, the walls unpapered, the furnishing of the
simplest, yet cheerfulness and homely comfort pervaded the room as
with an almost tangible spirit.
A brother three years older and a sister three years younger made a
trio of bright, childish faces about the hearth on winter evenings
as the years went by, while the mother read to them such tales as
childish minds could grasp. It was a loving little circle, one that
riveted sure and fast the ties of family affection and which helped
one boy at her knee in after life to enter with such sure sympathy
into the plain, simple lives of the humblest people he met. He had
lived that same life, he knew the family affection that grows with
such strength around simple firesides, and those of like circumstances
felt this knowledge and opened their hearts to him.
That Miranda Conwell was an unusual woman for those times and
circumstances is shown in those readings to her children. Not only
did she read and explain to them the beautiful stories of the Bible,
implanting its truths in their impressionable natures to blossom forth
later in beautiful deeds; but she read them the best literature of the
ancient days as well as current literature. Into this poor New England
home came the "New York Tribune" and the "National Era." The letters
of foreign correspondents opened to their childish eyes another world
and roused ambitions to see it. Henry Ward Beecher's sermons, and
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," when it came out as a serial, all such good and
helpful literature, she poured into the eager childish ears. These
readings went on, all through the happy days of childhood.
Interesting things were happening in the world then; things that were
to mould the future of one of the boys at her knee in a way she little
dreamed. A war was being waged in Mexico to train soldiers for a
greater war coming. Out in Illinois, a plain rail-splitter, farmer and
lawyer was beginning to be heard in the cause of freedom and justice
for all men, black or white. These rumors and discussions drifted into
the little home and arguments rose high around the crackling woodfire
as neighbors dropped in. Martin Conwell was not a man to watch
passively the trend of events. He took sides openly, vigorously, and
though the small, blue-eyed boy listening so attentively did not
comprehend all that it was about, Martin Conwell's views later took
shape in action that had a marked bearing on Russell's later life.
But the mother's reading bore more immediate, if less useful, fruit.
Hearing rather unusual sounds from the back yard one day, she went
to the door to listen. The evening before she had been reading the
children one of the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and telling them
something of this great man and his work. Mounted upon one of the
largest gray rocks in the yard, stood Russell, solemnly preaching to
a collection of wondering, round-eyed chickens. It was a serious,
impressive discourse he gave them, much of it, no doubt, a transcript
of Henry Ward Beecher's. What led his boyish fancy to do it, no
one knew, though many another child has done the same, as children
dramatize in play the things they have heard or read. But a chance
remark stamped that childish action upon the boyish imagination,
making it the corner stone of many a childish castle in Spain. Telling
her husband of it in the evening, Miranda Conwell said, half jokingly,
"our boy will some day be a great preacher." It was a fertile seed
dropped in a fertile mind, tilled assiduously for a brief space by
vivid childish imagination; but not ripened till sad experiences of
later years brought it to a glorious fruition.
Another result of the fireside readings might have been serious. A
short distance from the house a mountain stream leaps and foams over
the stones, seeming to choose, as Ruskin says, "the steepest places
to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering its handfuls of
crystal this way and that as the wind takes them." The walls of the
gorge rise sheer and steep; the path of the stream is strewn with huge
boulders, over which it foams snow white, pausing in quiet little
pools for breath before the next leap and scramble. Here and there at
the sides, stray tiny little waterfalls, very Thoreaus of streamlets,
content to wander off by themselves, away from the noisy rush of the
others, making little silvery rills of beauty in unobtrusive ways.
Over this gorge was a fallen log. Russell determined to enact the part
of Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," fleeing over the ice. It was a feat
to make a mother's heart stand still. Three separate times she
whipped him severely and forbade him to do it. He took the punishment
cheerfully, and went back to the log. He never gave up until he had
crossed it.
The vein of perseverance in his character was already setting into
firm, unyielding mould--the one trait to which Russell H. Conwell, the
preacher, the lecturer, writer, founder of college and hospital, may
attribute the success he has gained. This childish escapade was the
first to strike fire from its flint.