William Ellery Channing, preacher and writer, was born 7th April 1780 at Newport, Rhode Island. He graduated at Harvard in 1798, and in 1803 was ordained minister of a Congregational church in Boston, where his sermons were famous for their “fervour, solemnity, and beauty.” He was somewhat of a mystic, held Christ to be more than man, but was ultimately the leader of the Unitarians. In 1821 he received the title of D.D. from Harvard University, and next year he visited Europe, and made the acquaintance of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Among his Works (6 vols. 1841–46) were his “Essay on National Literature,” “Remarks on Milton,” “Character and Writings of Fénélon,” “Negro Slavery,” and “Self-culture.” He died October 2, 1842, at Bennington, Vermont.

Personal

  One of the greatest pleasures I have had here, or could have anywhere, has been seeing Mr. Channing. I have twice dined and spent the evening in his company, and sat next to him all the time. There is a superior light in his mind that sheds a pure, bright gleam on every thing that comes from it. He talks freely upon common topics, but they seem no longer to be common topics when he speaks of them. There is the influence of the sanctuary, the holy place about him…. It seems to me that it would be impossible to live within the sphere of Mr. Channing’s influence without being in some degree spiritualized by it.

  My Dear H—, I began this letter yesterday, and am this moment returned from a long visit to Dr. Channing…. The outward man of the eloquent preacher and teacher is rather insignificant, and produces no impression at first sight of unusual intellectual supremacy; and though his eyes and forehead are fine, they did not seem to me to do justice to the mind expressed in his writings; for though Shakespeare says,

“There is no art to read the mind’s construction in the face,”

I think the mental qualities are more often detected there than the moral ones. He is short and slight in figure, and looks, as indeed he is, extremely delicate, an habitual invalid; his eyes, which are gray, are well and deeply set, and the brow and forehead fine, though not, perhaps, as striking as I had expected. The rest of the face has no peculiar character, and is rather plain. He talked to me a great deal about the stage, acting, the dramatic art; and, professing to know nothing about it, maintained some theories which proved he did not, indeed, know much.

  I gave Mr. Persico no encouragement to make an experiment on my head. It is too thin, and has too little beauty for this art. Painting, I think, can take greater liberties than sculpture, and even painting has made poor work with my face. I am certainly not vain of my exterior. My countenance would not make me many friends, I fear. What has troubled me in my different portraits is, that they have not given me a more intellectual expression, but that so little benevolence has beamed from the features. I have learned, with the Apostle, to prefer charity to all knowledge; and, if I am to be handed down to posterity, I should be pleased to speak from the stone or canvas, or rather to breathe from it, good-will to mankind.

  Thence I went to Boston, where I spent nearly a fortnight very pleasantly, and saw much of Dr. Channing, the good, the wise, the great. Don’t you envy me? We will have everlasting talks of him when we meet. I heard him preach—like an apostle!

	Here rest the remains of
	WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING,
	Born, 7 April, 1780,
	at Newport, R. I.;
	Ordained, 1 June, 1803,
	as a minister of Jesus Christ
	to the Society worshipping God
	in Federal Street, Boston:
	Died, 2 October, 1842,
	while on a journey,
	at Bennington, Vermont.
	———
	In Memory of
	WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING,
	honored throughout Christendom,
	for his eloquence and courage
	in maintaining and advancing
	the Great Cause of
	Truth, Religion, and Human Freedom,
	This Monument
	is gratefully and reverently erected
	by the Christian Society,
	of which, during nearly forty years,
	he was Pastor.

	Thou livest in the life of all good things;
	What words thou spak’st for Freedom shall not die;
	Thou sleepest not, for now thy Love hath wings
	To soar where hence thy Hope could hardly fly.
	*        *        *        *        *
	This laurel-leaf I cast upon thy bier;
	Let worthier hands than these thy wreath intwine;
	Upon thy hearse I shed no useless tear,—
	For us weep rather thou in calm divine!

  With few of the physical attributes belonging to the orator, he was an orator of surpassing grace. His soul tabernacled in a body that was little more than a filament of clay. He was small in stature; but when he spoke his person seemed to dilate with the majesty of his thoughts,—as the Hercules of Lysippus, a marvel of ancient art, though not more than a foot in height, revived in the mind the superhuman strength which overcame the Nemean lion…. His voice was soft and musical, not loud or full in tone; and yet, like conscience, it made itself heard in the inmost chambers of the soul. His eloquence was gentleness and persuasion, reasoning for religion, humanity, and justice. He did not thunder or lighten. The rude elemental forces furnish no proper image of his power. Like sunshine, his words descended upon the souls of his hearers, and under their genial influence the hard in heart were softened, while the closely hugged mantle of prejudice and error dropped to the earth. His eloquence had not the character and fashion of forensic effort or parliamentary debate. It mounted above these, into an atmosphere unattempted by the applauded orators of the world.

  He sought and longed for a perfectly free communication; and no conversation interested him more than that which, in forgetfulness of him and of one’s self and of every thing extraneous, was a kind of monologue, a kind of reverie, the purest and most abstract idealism. Least of all must it be supposed that there was any assumption about him, or any stiff formality or precision,—any thing that said, “Now let us talk great talk.” Never. He did talk greatly, because he could not help it. But his manner of doing it, his manner in every thing, was the most simple, the most unpretending, imaginable. At the same time he possessed a nature the most truly social. He regretted any thing in himself or in others that repressed it. More than once has he said to me, “I am too serious.” He longed to feel upon his spirit the free and genial breath of society…. I wish it were in my power to give any idea of the extraordinary character of this conversation. On my first acquaintance with him, it was my happiness to pass a number of weeks under his own roof. His health was then delicate; he went abroad but little; but his mind was left untouched by the frailty of his body; and I found it constantly occupied and struggling with great questions. On the highest philosophy, on the highest religion, on the highest wisdom of life, all the day long he pursued the questions which these themes present, without ever slackening, or ever turning aside to ordinary and commonplace talk. The range of his subjects was as great as their elevation; from the most recondite point in philosophy—the difference between relative and absolute truth—to the forms of philanthropic enterprise and political development around him. But his favorite themes were man and the New Testament; man,—his condition and the philosophy of his condition; the New Testament,—Jesus Christ, his teaching, and the sublimest contemplation of God.

  Thus tranquilly passed Dr. Channing’s days at Oakland. Up usually, in the morning, before any of his guests were risen, his quick step was heard upon the gravel walk, and, looking from the window, one saw him, with his shawl or gown wrapped round his shoulders and the dogs gambolling by his side, passing amid the shrubbery, and stopping each moment to gaze, at a newly opened flower, a gleam of sunshine on the dewy lawn, or some passing bird scattering drops from the branches, caught his eye. His own expression—“When I see my friends after the night’s separation, let me receive them as new gifts from God, as raised from the dead”—describes precisely the character of his greeting. The beaming eyes, the radiant smile, the grasp of the hand, the joyous tone, all spoke to the spirit, saying,—“What an inestimable privilege it is to live together in this glorious home which our Father gives us each day anew!” Without a word or look that was not as spontaneous as the delight of a child, he seemed so softened with religious sensibility, that his very “good morning” was a welcome to prayer.

  The most singular thing in his utterance was the extraordinary flexibility of his voice, its vast and “undulating” variety of modulation. It seemed to us like one of those delicate, scientific instruments, invented to detect and measure the subtilest elements in nature, and sensitive to the slightest influence,—as, for instance, those nicely adjusted scales which vibrate under the small dust on the balance or the weight of a hair. It rose and fell so strangely in the course of the simplest and most commonplace sentence, in the utterance of a single word often, that his hearers felt immediately that here was a speaker of a novel kind, and they watched to see how he could possibly become, according to any ordinary sense of the word, eloquent. If our readers who were wont to hear him will recall the word “immortality” as spoken by Dr. Channing, they will understand what we endeavour to describe. His style of speaking, from this peculiarity, was instantly felt to be his own,—not the product of any art, but the gift of nature; if indeed it could be thought a gift, and not a misfortune, when only its singularity was apparent, before its capabilities were witnessed and its wondrous power felt. There was no want of firmness in his tones, and yet they fluctuated continually. And the power of his voice lay in this, that, being thus flexible, it was true to every change of emotion that arose in his mind.

  Dr. Channing’s life is full of interest, but of a calm, thoughtful kind. He had no adventures; nor were his inward struggles, as detailed, at least, very striking. He had taken immense pains with himself, but the nobler element of his nature was so strongly predominant, that his life was steady continuous victory, unmarked by any of those partial victories of evil which give fearful interest to the lives of the greater part of those who have fought their way to uncommon excellence. The purest love for man, the most unconquerable trust in human nature, seem to have been the very basis of his being. He was a Unitarian, but that is a very wide term, including a vast variety of persons thinking very differently on essentials. I can only say that I should be very glad if half of those who recognise the hereditary claims on the Son of God to worship, bowed down before his moral dignity with an adoration half as profound, or a love half as enthusiastic, as Dr. Channing’s. I wish I, a Trinitarian, loved and adored Him, and the Divine goodness in Him, anything near the way in which that Unitarian felt. A religious lady found the book on my table a few days ago, and was horror-struck. I told her that if she and I ever got to heaven, we should find Dr. Channing revolving round the central Light in an orbit immeasurably nearer than ours, almost invisible to us, and lost in a blaze of light; which she has no doubt, duly reported to the Brighton inquisition for heretics.

	Not vainly did old poets tell,
	Nor vainly did old genius paint
	God’s great and crowning miracle,—
	The hero and the saint!
	For even in a faithless day
	Can we our sainted ones discern;
	And feel, while with them on the way
	Our hearts within us burn.
	And thus the common tongue and pen
	Which, world-wide, echo CHANNING’S fame,
	As one of Heaven’s anointed men,
	Have sanctified his name.

  I have often heard him [John Wilson] speak of Americans in terms of admiration. He knew many, and received all who came to see him with much interest and kindness…. Of one of them he always spoke with profound respect, as a man whose spiritual life and great accomplishments, pure philosophical inquiries and critical taste, had given him a lofty position among his countrymen—Dr. Channing, the piety of whose character made his life upon earth one of singular beauty.

  Some men live always on the plane of what is common: they live in averages, and take life at low-water mark. Others rise and fall again, sometimes having a moment of enthusiasm, a sparkle of generosity, and then subsiding into their old routine. But Dr. Channing was always breathing the pure air of the mountaintop. Whenever you went into his room, he would begin some strain of a higher mood, some theme of pure religion, something which would lift you into the realm of eternal truths, something which would make you better and happier during the whole day.

  Dr. Channing, between whom and Harriet Martineau a true friendship subsisted to the day of his death, was a good man, but not in any sense a great one. With benevolent intentions, he could not greatly help the nineteenth century, for he knew very little about it or indeed of any other. He had neither insight, courage nor firmness. In his own church had sprung up a vigorous opposition to slavery, which he innocently, in so far as ignorantly, used the little strength he had to stay. He was touched by Brougham’s eloquent denial of the right of property in man, and he adopted the idea as a theme: but he dreaded any one who claimed, on behalf of the slaves, that their masters should instantly renounce that right of ownership; he was terror-stricken at the idea of calling on the whole American people to take counsel on so difficult and delicate a matter in anti-slavery associations; and, above all, he deprecated the admission of the colored race to our ranks. He had been selected by a set of money-making men as their representative for piety, as Edward Everett was their representative gentleman and scholar, Judge Story their representative gentleman, jurist, and companion in social life, and Daniel Webster their representative statesman and advocate, looking after their business interests in Congress.

  During these years (from 1828 to ’32), I often heard Doctor Channing preach. His attenuated figure and face, his large luminous eyes, and his sweet but pervading voice, formed a peculiar presence not to be forgotten. His manner was calm and rarely aided by gesture, but earnest and deeply impressive, and he possessed the magnetism that carried the audience side by side with him, from point to point of his discourse. In social life he was not unamiable, but his grand views of humanity seemed to lift his attention above social surroundings.

  Dr. Channing, whilst he lived, was the star of the American Church, and we then thought, if we do not still think, that he left no successor in the pulpit. He could never be reported, for his eye and voice could not be printed, and his discourses lose their best in losing them. He was made for the public; his cold temperament made him the most unprofitable private companion; but all America would have been impoverished in wanting him. We could not then spare a single word he uttered in public, not so much as the reading a lesson in Scripture, or a hymn, and it is curious that his printed writings are almost a history of the times; as there was no great public interest, political, literary, or even economical (for he wrote on the Tariff), on which he did not leave some printed record of his brave and thoughtful opinion. A poor little invalid all his life, he is yet one of those men who vindicate the power of the American race to produce greatness.

  While Parker’s and Beecher’s pulpits echoed Jonathan Mayhew’s morning gun and fired words like cannon-balls, in the highest pulpit of America, foremost among the champions of liberty, stood the slight and radiant figure of the scholarly son of Rhode Island, upon whom more than upon any of her children the mantle of Roger Williams had worthily fallen, William Ellery Channing.

  No wonder we sometimes heard that from day to day it required the tenderest nursing to keep the soul in the body. See him on Sunday as he moves up the pulpit stairs. His debility fills you with sympathy and anxiety. He sinks exhausted on his seat; and when he rises to give out the hymn, he is too weak, you fear, for the service. The single lock of his soft brown hair, as it falls across his forehead, contrasts strongly with its transparent paleness, and his thin hollow cheeks are covered with pain-caused lines. The first tones of his voice, though feeble and low, are reverential, and stir the hushed congregation to devoutness. After the hymn, read with more strength, is sung, he rises for the sermon. A few sentences are uttered, when you feel that, out of all this weakness, there are coming words of a rare energy. His full eye kindles, his voice gains strength, and, forgetting his delicate figure, you are borne on, with increasing sway, assured that this man is a power to move, thrill, and inspire. Perhaps there was never a more striking demonstration of the power of the human will over the body than in Dr. Channing…. Such men as Channing do not grow old with the lapse of years. We who saw him, on and on, from his early manhood to his closing days, remember how little he changed, even in personal appearance, with the approach of age. It seems to me, as I recall him in his meridian, that he showed more the effects of toil and time, and his face was more pallid and careworn, than in the last years of his life. At that time his countenance grew more radiant, and he manifestly felt more at ease, and enjoyed this world as he never had before.

  The fact is, that the man who loomed to such gigantic spiritual stature in the pulpit was not a great pastor. With all his interest in education, he did not personally come near the average youth of his congregation. We revered him and were very proud of him, but the distance between us was impassable. I am speaking of him, of course, as he appeared to the very young…. Channing’s gift was that of a preacher. His sermons, while coherent and complete as compositions, were given with a warmth and intensity of expression with which scholarship and delicacy of thought are seldom united.

  While we were at Boston, at a dinner given him [Gen. Winfield Scott] by that venerable merchant prince, Thomas H. Perkins, he was placed next to Dr. Channing. My seat at the table was too distant to enable me to understand them, but I observed that the general was an attentive listener. They presented a singular contrast—a giant warrior listening with deference to a puny preacher, whose frail body excited compassion. His learning and eloquence, which were ennobled by a spirit of benevolence, secured to Dr. Channing a profound respect even from those men who could not agree with his theology and his restrictive code of morals. Returning from the dinner the general told me the subject of their conversation was the Grecian Philosophy, and he fancied he had been spending the evening with Anaxagoras.

  Personally he was amiable, kindly, and courteous, notwithstanding the distance at which he seems to have kept all men.

  Newport has honored the memory and name of her illustrious son by the erection of a handsome memorial church and a substantial monument. Perhaps it should be said more precisely that these memorials of the great divine have been erected within her borders; for the church is virtually the gift of the Unitarians of the world, though the movement for its erection was started in Newport, and the monument witnesses to the generosity of a single individual, and he a Newporter only by virtue of his residence in the city during the summer months. But though Newport is only partially and indirectly responsible for these two handsome memorials, she is proud to have them; and with the old house where Channing was born, the old church in which he preached, the farm house and meeting-house on the island, which he frequented, they are among the most cherished of Newport’s points of interest and of the links binding the city of the present day with that of the past and with the great men who have been her sons or who have lived or tarried within her borders.

General

  He looks through the external forms of things in search of the secret and mysterious principles of thought, action, and being. He takes little notice of the varieties of manners and character that form the favourite topics of the novelist and poet. Mind in the abstract, its nature, proprieties, and destiny, are his constant theme. He looks at material objects chiefly as the visible expressions of the existence, character, and will of the sublime Unseen Intelligence whose power created and whose presence informs and sustains the universe.

  Offer my respectful regards to Dr. Channing, whom certainly I could not count on for a reader, or other than a grieved condemnatory one; for I reckoned tolerance had its limits. His own faithful, long-continued striving towards what is best, I knew and honored; that he will let me go my own way thitherward, with a God-speed from him, is surely a new honor to us both.

  Dr. Channing’s little book [“Negro Slavery”] will be received with unhesitating and unmingled consent and applause in Europe, and will add at once to his reputation, which is already much greater than I supposed; not as extensive as that of Washington Irving, but almost as much so, and decidedly higher. My bookseller here told me, to-day, he thought an English edition of his works would sell well on the Continent, they are so frequently asked for in his shop; and Baron Bülow, a young Prussian, brought me the other night a letter from the Duchess of Anhalt Dessau, inquiring earnestly how she could procure them for herself. In England, again and again, where I should least have suspected it, I found him held in the highest estimation; one of the old Besborough family, for instance, looking upon a present of one of his sermons as one of the most agreeable things that could happen to him; and Mrs. Somerville, Miss Joanna Baillie, and several other persons, of no less note, declaring to me that he was generally regarded by their friends, as well as themselves, as the best writer of English prose alive. If the book on Slavery is written with only the usual talent of his other works, I will venture to predict that it will be more admired than anything he has yet printed.

  As the name of Dr. Channing stands high in American literature for several works which have shown much vigour of thinking, some talent for declamation, and generally considerable success in composition, we are bound to observe that, had nothing from his pen ever reached us but the tract now before us, we should have been at a loss to comprehend the grounds of the reputation which he enjoys to a certain degree on either side of the Atlantic. The taste which it displays is far from being correct; his diction is exceedingly affected; and the affectation is that of extreme vigour and refinement of thought, often when he is only unmeaning, contradictory, or obscure. His opinions on critical matters likewise indicate a very defective taste, and show that, in his own practice of writing, he goes wrong on a false theory; and in pursuit of the “striking”—the “grand”—the “uncommon.” That his style should be perspicuous can, indeed, hardly be expected, when he avows the incredible opinion, that a composition may be too easily understood, and complains of the recent efforts to make science intelligible to the bulk of mankind, that their tendency is to degrade philosophy under the show of seeking after usefulness.

  Dr. Channing, whose style is irradiated with all the splendours of a glowing imagination, showing, as powerfully as any other example, probably, in English prose, of what melody and compass the language is capable under the touch of genius instinct with genuine enthusiasm.

  His reputation both at home and abroad is deservedly high, and in regard to the matters of purity, polish, and modulation of style, he may be said to have attained the dignity of a standard and a classic.

  There is one word that covers every cause to which Channing devoted his talents and his heart, and that word is FREEDOM. Liberty is the key of his religious, his political, his philanthropic principles. Free the slave, free the serf, free the ignorant, free the sinful. Let there be no chains upon the conscience, the intellect, the pursuits, or the persons of men. Free agency is the prime distinction and privilege of humanity. It is the first necessity of a moral being. Extinguish freedom, and you extinguish humanity. Tyranny is spiritual murder, as sin is moral suicide.

  I think Channing an admirable writer. So much sense and eloquence. Such a command of language. Yet, admirable as his sermon on war is, I have the vanity to think my own equally good, quite as sensible, quite as eloquent, as full of good principle and fine language; and you will be the more inclined to agree with me in this comparison, when I tell you that I preached in St. Paul’s the identical sermon which Lord Grey so much admires. I thought I could not write anything half so good, so I preached Channing.

  From the appearance of his “Discourse on the Evidences of Christianity”—a luminous exposition—till the lamented death of this eminent man, the public expectation which had been raised so high by the character of his earliest performances was continually excited and fulfilled by the appearance of some new and earnest expression of his thoughts on themes which come immediately home to men’s business and bosoms,—religion, government, and literature in their widest sense and application.

  We have already observed that a critic of Art places him in an American triumvirate with Allston and Washington. More frequently he is associated with Washington and Franklin. Unlike Washington, he was never general or president; unlike Franklin, he never held high office. But it would be difficult to say that since then any American has exerted greater sway over his fellow-men. And yet, if it be asked what single measure he carried to a successful close, I could not answer. It is on character that he has wrought and is still producing incalculable change. So extensive is this influence, that multitudes now feel it although strangers to his spoken or even his written word. The whole country and age feel it…. He helped to bring government within the Christian circle, and taught the statesman that there is one comprehensive rule, binding on the conscience in public affairs as in private affairs.

  It may be doubted whether another instance can be found of an individual arresting so much attention in the literary world, and yet claiming no place there, finding himself a literary man by accident. The laurels that were showered upon him he took not the slightest pains to gather or preserve. If they appeared to be falling off, he did not even carry himself with the slightest care to keep them on. If a hand was extended to pluck them from him, he showed no sign of resistance, nor did a shade of mortified vanity ever darken those thoughtful and beaming eyes. If his distinguished reviewers thought to wound and humble him, as, from their occasional strength of phrase, would seem to have been their design, never was expectation more completely disappointed. He barely knew of their assaults; they fell far short of his equanimity. He thought even less of the arrows that were discharged at him than the lion of the dewdrops on his mane, for he never stirred to shake them off.

  He inspired respect more than he won confidence. His thoughts interested his friends more than himself. His name was an exponent of certain principles associated with human progress and moral truth, rather than an endearing household spell. In conversation he appeared mainly intent upon gleaning from his auditors new facts to aid his own speculations. If they had seen a new country, undergone a peculiar experience, or reflected deeply on general truth, he sought, by rigid inquiry, to elicit the result. Thus as a moralist, he pursued the same course as Goethe in his literary vocation—seeking to make his fellow-creatures objective, recoiling from assimilation, and repelling all sympathetic approach, in order to render them subservient to a professional end.

  It was impossible for him to be a learned man. He spread himself sometimes beneath the tree of knowledge; and, for a while, the leaves would drop through the air of motionless attention, and rest upon the silent grass of thought; but the winds that swept over his soul were so frequent and so fresh, that nothing could lie where it fell, and the forms of fancy displaced the order of deposition. There is a peculiarity in his composition, which is traceable to the same cause. His writings exhibit nothing logical, nothing architectoric in their structure. They are not put together in demonstration of a particular truth, or to show the perspective of a complex system; but in exposition of a profound sentiment. He never thinks in a line, but always from a centre, to which he returns again and again, in order to radiate forth in new directions. Thus he does not survey a subject, he does not prosecute it; he dwells upon it.

  I do not place the writings of Dr. Channing as high in the scale of intellectual merit as his Boston friends and admirers are wont to do.

  The spiritual beauty of his writings is very great; they are all distinguished for sweetness, elevation, candour, and a severe devotion to truth. On great questions, he took middle ground, and sought a panoramic view; he wished also to stand high, yet never forgot what was above more than what was around and beneath him. He was not well acquainted with man on the impulsive and passionate side of his nature, so that his view of character was sometimes narrow, but it was always noble. He exercised an expansive and purifying power on the atmosphere, and stands a godfather at the baptism of this country.

  Channing is an antique man, with a Christian heart; in humanity a Greek, in citizenship a Roman, in Christianity an apostle. It would be a misapprehension to conceive of him as a learned and speculative theologian.

  Channing never identified himself with any theological party. He called himself a Unitarian, and so in a sense he was, but his views were Arian rather than what are commonly known as Unitarian.

  It has been already said that Channing became an author by accident; he himself said so. He never cared to think of himself as a littérateur; and yet it is noteworthy that his sermons had a leading part with those of his great contemporaries, Buckminster and the rest, in giving the sermon a place here in literature, as a literary production, and not mere sectarian, theological, political, or historical matter,—a place, in short, in polite literature, and among the humanities. Channing himself, indeed, repeatedly disclaims paying any special attention to mere style…. The style of Channing is plain, pure, and perspicuous. It has the transparency of a clear, calm autumn afternoon, when no haze dims the serenity of the atmosphere. Sometimes, though more rarely, it has the sober splendor of those after-summer hours, when a mingled mellowness and brilliancy charm the beholder. But, withal, it is marked by a self-contained quietness and even flow. It has an ease which never degenerates into that inflated and turgid manner which sometimes impairs the style of his classmate, Judge Story. It has a certain chaste elegance, but is remarkably free from ornament; deals very sparingly in figures, and scarcely uses one, excepting where the figure is not mere ornament, but argument; resembling, so far, more the style of Webster than that of Everett.

  I scarcely need say that I yield to no one in love and reverence for the great and good man whose memory, outliving all prejudices of creed, sect, and party, is the common legacy of Christendom. As the years go on, the value of that legacy will be more and more felt; not so much, perhaps, in doctrine as in spirit, in those utterances of a devout soul which are above and beyond the affirmation or negation of dogma. His ethical severity and Christian tenderness; his hatred of wrong and oppression, with love and pity for the wrong-doer; his noble pleas for self-culture, temperance, peace, and purity; and above all, his precept and example of unquestioning obedience to duty and voice of God in his soul, can never become obsolete. It is very fitting that his memory should be especially cherished with that of Hopkins and Berkeley in the beautiful island to which the common residence of those worthies has lent additional charms and interest.

  In the history of the so-called Transcendental movement of New England I know no name older than Dr. Channing’s. I have told how his preaching in 1820 began to emancipate me from the materialistic system of Priestley, and his conversation in 1825 from that of Brown, and his introducing me to Coleridge, from whom I first learned the meaning of the word “transcendental.” And when Carlyle’s writings and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures, in 1832, began to quicken our Boston thinking, it seemed to me that at last Dr. Channing’s spiritual philosophy had begun to pervade society, and was about to give it the depth and broad scope of the original Christian faith.

  A keen practical sense of the duties of life is, in most of his work, more conspicuous than abstract speculative power; but his insight into the position of parties, his charitable view of them, and his forecasts of the probability of future conflicts, are remarkable. Though at variance with the majority of the creeds of Christendom, Channing’s writings are everywhere marked by a reverential spirit, and not unfrequently by a touch of inherited asceticism. His essays on “Self-Culture” anticipate much said, more recently, by the later school of free-thought, to which he gave the first distinct impulse…. Dr. Channing’s work is so far from that of a mere intellectual sensualist that he has been called a purist; but he loved Beauty as well as Virtue for its own sake, and his style is generally free from the defects of taste frequent in the writings of his contemporaries. The “Essay on National Literature” (1824), by which his reputation was first made, is singularly suggestive, and only errs by the intrusion, here and there, of anti-Calvanistic polemic. His review of Fénélon abounds in passages, as the often quoted picture of religious peace, which exhibit the delicacy of his perceptions; but the breadth and force of his sympathy is most manifest in his “Remarks on Milton,” à propos of the publication of the posthumous “De Doctrina Christiana.”

  Our recognized literature began with Bryant and Irving; but its real sources were in Channing, his associates and disciples, or rather in the intellectual movement that followed the decline of ecclesiastical rule. Channing, so far as he was a conscious agent, was a mild-tempered agitator, remarkable for nobility of character and for a spirituality that was almost angelic. The revolution he led was against the dominant theology, but the influence was felt by millions who never accepted the new doctrines. Clerical limitations became obsolete. People rediscovered Shakespeare, as amateur astronomers discover Jupiter; for the works of the chief of poets had before this been unknown to Puritan libraries. It was found that there were writers and thinkers who were not wearers of Geneva bands. Channing himself was no longer shut up in a remote corner, but was welcomed into the fraternity of lettered men. Until his Essays on Milton, Fénélon, and Napoleon appeared, European scholars had never thought of America except in connection with savages, fish, furs, and rebellion. The breadth and force of this movement can scarcely be overestimated. Excepting Irving, Cooper, and Poe, there has not been an American author of high rank in this century whose intellectual lineage is not traceable, directly or indirectly, to Channing and Emerson.

  He was never quite an invalid, but he was always a valetudinarian. In particular, he had a singular sensitiveness to cold; and the recollection of many of his friends will recall his presence, oftenest at the fireside corner of his warmly sheltered and softly furnished room. That soft and warm shelter he seemed always to crave and need as much as a sick child. What to a more vigorous man would be indolent indulgence, with him was a necessity of life and the condition of any working force. Circumstances gave him, through all his working and declining years, this necessary shelter, and screened him from the raw wind of the world by the surroundings and the comforts of sufficient wealth. His virtue lay not in manly struggle with difficulty and hardship, but in the consecration of life-long leisure and ample opportunity to something very different from a selfish luxury. He had as little of the storm and battle of life as can fall to any serious man to encounter; but was surrounded always by the respectful, affectionate, vigilant, and almost too obsequious homage and love of near friends. Ideally, his thought took in the widest sweep of duty and every sacred sympathy and homely obligation that bind man to his kind: personally, he was perplexed, shrinking, helpless, in the presence of any one of the rougher tasks that would bring him face to face with coarse suffering and want.

  Loftiness of conception raised him and his disciples into the region of art; and, with much that was produced in the charged atmosphere of Unitarian revolt, their discourses, overleaping the boundaries of sect, form additions to American literature.

  Channing, however, was still the legitimate spiritual successor of Jonathan Edwards in affirming, with new emphasis, the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, that God is in direct communication with the souls of His creatures. The difference is that Edwards holds the doors of communication so nearly closed that only the elect can pass in; Channing throws them wide open, and invites everybody to be illumined in thought and vitalized in will by the ever-fresh outpourings of celestial light and warmth. But Channing wrote on human nature as though the world was tenanted by actual or possible Channings, who possessed his exceptional delicacy of spiritual perception and his exceptional exemption from the temptations of practical life. He was, as far as a constant contemplation of the Divine perfections was concerned, a meditative saint; and had he belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, he probably would, on the ground of his spiritual gifts, have been eventually canonized.

  Of all those who, on either side, took part in the Unitarian controversy, William Ellery Channing put forth the writings most deserving of notice by the literary student…. As a writer, Channing seemed to produce his sentences spontaneously rather than with labor limæ, but his natural grace and acquired art stood him in good stead. Behind his straightforward and seemingly artless words were strength of opinion and a well-stored mind; in his own idea he was simply delivering his message and saying his say; but his hearers knew him to be eloquent.

  A man many years my junior, who is himself winning a foremost place among the pioneer minds of our time, asked me a few days ago if Channing had not been greatly overrated. In blended surprise and indignation I was hardly able to reply by a civil negative. Yet when I pondered on the question it no longer surprised me; for it was in the enunciation and defense of principles now regarded as axioms by men of all sects and parties, classes and conditions, that Channing, more than half a century ago, encountered the bitter repugnancy of the many and gained the superlative admiration of the few.

  Channing seems to have preached more sermons to himself than to the world. His love of rectitude led him to this excessive conscientiousness, but it brought him great good in other directions. It gave him a respect for the opinions of other men as catholic as it was humble…. He was a moral, not an intellectual, reformer; his work was not the destruction of a theology, but the spread of charity. He felt more than he reasoned, and hence his rationalism was bounded, not by the unknown, but by the mystical. He was satisfied with this, and does not seem to have wished to make a definite statement of his beliefs.

  To my mind Channing’s emphasis-proportion in the paragraph is more rational, though less brilliant, than Macaulay’s. Channing knew the worth of the semicolon: Macaulay did not. On the other hand Channing’s paragraphs are too long to be well massed. Nor is the right bulk always assigned to the main ideas. We can find little fault with Channing’s unity, and little with his coherence.

  Aside from his work as a religious and social reformer in the van of a movement that was destined to accomplish great things, Channing was a man of letters of high rank, exerting an influence on pure literature in New England equalled by no one before the time of Emerson.

  Channing is the most eminent representative of the Unitarian movement of this country…. A clear mind, not wanting in imaginative warmth, a transparent, natural style, neither slovenly nor overwrought, the sympathies and attainments of a man of letters, even though he was not widely read—are manifest in his writings. Superadded to these qualities, there was a sanctity of spirit which was felt by those who heard him in the pulpit, or met him even casually in conversation. It was not simply that he was sincere, and that he spoke in the accents of conviction…. Channing’s eminence is chiefly due, first, to the elevated fervor which inspired his teaching, and which was of inestimable advantage in a movement in which the intellectual factor stood in so high a ratio to the religious; and, secondly, to the circumstance that he embodied in himself so fully the ethical and philanthropic impulse which principally constituted the positive living force of the Unitarian cause. Following out the humanitarian tendency, he acquired, at home and abroad, a high and, in the main, a deserved fame as the champion of justice in opposition to slavery and other social evils.