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Some chapters back, the short but pleasant friendship of Catherine Beecher and Angelina Grimké was mentioned. Very soon after that little episode, the Beechers removed to Cincinnati, where the doctor was called to the Presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary.
At its mouth the Beechers kept their boat, a cumbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early Canon Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had to walk the two miles which separated Ballymoy from the lake shore. Mrs.
"Will ushers of Plymouth Church please seat the bearer in the Pastor's pew." And in the Pastor's pew I sat, listening to that magnificent bass-viol voice with its persuasive low accent, its torrential scorn! After the sermon I went to the Beechers' home. Mr. Beecher sat with a saucer of uncut gems by him on the table.
He still believed himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father's prayers. But he found it increasingly difficult after an hour or two of companionship with Marion Beecher to get back to the emotions which had swayed him during the weeks of his intimacy with Miss Goold.
How the snow must have beaten in her face and the lake-waves choked her breath! It was a great story, but the girls, shouting from the water's edge, reminded him that he was out to pull an oar, and not to sentimentalize. He and the Canon rose, half smiling, half sighing, and took their places in the boat. They penetrated before luncheon time to a bay hitherto unknown to the Beechers.
The man who can laugh at himself, and who is not anxious to have the last word, is right in the suburbs of greatness. However, the Beechers all had a deal of positivism in their characters. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six, declared he would not shave until John C. Fremont was elected President. It is needless to add that he wore whiskers the rest of his life.
We can well understand that the withdrawal of nearly all its students after the great discussion was a sore trial to the Beechers, and intensified their already adverse feelings towards abolitionists.
They hated all England for the sake of less than half England. They counted their enemies but never their friends. There's nothing unnatural about this, nothing rare. On the contrary, it's the usual, natural, unjust thing that human nature does in times of agony. It's the Henry Ward Beechers that are rare. In times of agony the average man and woman see nothing but their agony.
The politicians had become political stock-jobbers, and the seekers of wealth had become usurers and swindlers; and into these two classes may be divided nearly the whole Yankee population. Such is "Plymouth Rock" in our day, with its Beechers in the pulpit, and its Lincoln in the chair of Washington!
He came to see us in "Much Ado about Nothing" and, next day sent me some little volumes of his work with a lovely inscription on the front page. I miss him very much when I go to Boston now. In New York, how much I miss Mrs. Beecher I could never say. The Beechers were the most wonderful pair. What an actor he would have made! He read scenes from Shakespeare to Henry and me at luncheon one day.
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