Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-olds
three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale; but age
magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old people are a
kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it
may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved
features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details, like
so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be. The
middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint impressions in my
memory, but how grandly the procession of the old clergymen who filled
our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof, marches
before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David Osgood,
the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy
over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster of
Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth,
which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical aspect;
and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of
Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first living
person ever pointed out to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason Harris of
Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand,
being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was
adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring
of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in
decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as
if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and that
other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so
long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it
almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the
resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little
Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated,
reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in
wickedness or wit.
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