FullReads

From this time dates my father’s possession and use of the German Exegetics. After my mother’s death I slept with him; his bed was in his study, a small room,[5] with a very small grate; and I remember well his getting those fat, shapeless, spongy German books, as if one would sink in them, and be bogged in their bibulous, unsized paper; and watching him as he impatiently cut them up, and dived into them in his rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and dropping for my play such a lot of soft, large, curled bits from the paper-cutter, leaving the edges all shaggy. He never came to bed when I was awake, which was not to be wondered at; but I can remember often awaking far on in the night or morning, and seeing that keen, beautiful, intense face bending over these Rosenmuellers, and Ernestis, and Storrs, and Kuinoels–the fire out, and the gray dawn peering through the window; and when he heard me move, he would speak to me in the foolish words of endearment my mother was wont to use, and come to bed, and take me, warm as I was, into his cold bosom.

[Footnote 5: On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years my mother’s parasol, by his orders–I daresay, for long, the only one in Biggar.]

Vitringa in Jesaiam I especially remember, a noble folio. Even then, with that eagerness to communicate what he had himself found, of which you must often have been made the subject, he went and told it. He would try to make me, small man as I was, “apprehend” what he and Vitringa between them had made out of the fifty-third chapter of his favorite prophet, the princely Isaiah.[6] Even then, so far as I can recall, he never took notes of what he read. He did not need this, his intellectual force and clearness were so great; he was so totus in illo, whatever it was, that he recorded by a secret of its own, his mind’s results and victories and memoranda, as he went on; he did not even mark his books, at least very seldom; he marked his mind.

[Footnote 6: His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpin to John Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson could not have given

“The dinner waits, and we are tired;”
Says Gilpin, “So am I,”

better; and to hear him sounding the depths and cadences of the Living Temple, “bearing on its front this doleful inscription, ‘Here God once dwelt,'” was like listening to the recitative of Handel. But Isaiah was his masterpiece; and I remember quite well his startling us all when reading at family worship, “His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God,” by a peremptory, explosive sharpness, as of thunder overhead, at the words “the mighty God,” similar to the rendering now given to Handel’s music, and doubtless so meant by him; and then closing with “the Prince of Peace,” soft and low. No man who wishes to feel Isaiah, as well as understand him, should be ignorant of Handel’s “Messiah.” His prelude to “Comfort ye”–its simple theme, cheerful and infinite as the ripple of the unsearchable sea–gives a deeper meaning to the words. One of my father’s great delights in his dying months was reading the lives of Handel and of Michael Angelo, then newly out. He felt that the author of “He was despised,” and “He shall feed his flock,” and those other wonderful airs, was a man of profound religious feeling, of which they were the utterance; and he rejoiced over the warlike airs and choruses of “Judas Maccabaeus.” You have recorded his estimate of the religious nature of him of the terribile via; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such a mighty genius walked humbly with his God.]