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NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE.

NEW SERIES.

SEPTEMBER, 1890.

VOL. III.

No. I.

T

MARK HOPKINS.

By Rev. Frank H. Kasson.

HERE have been few Americans worthier of praise than Mark Hopkins. He built himself into the mental fabric of two generations of men. They hold him in gentle, loving, and grateful remembrance. He erected in their hearts the "monument more enduring than brass." For many such it is unnecessary to speak of his exalted character, his majestic intellectual powers, and his commanding personality. For the general public it is not unnecessary, and the word cannot be spoken too often. Many great eulogiums will yet be pronounced upon the work and character of President Hopkins; touching pictures will be drawn of his person, his manner, and his inspiring companionship; historians will dwell upon his gentle but mighty influence in helping forward and upward the intellectual activities of the nineteenth century. Our aim is simply to scatter a few more flowers upon his grave before the enduring bronze of literature rises above it.

above, could not even in early years be otherwise than a mystic. An ardent lover of nature, he instinctively turned from the study of nature to the joyful contemplation of the God of nature.

Mark Hopkins had an ancestry of which a man might be justly proud. He was the grandson of a soldier, and bore his name. Colonel Mark Hopkins graduated at Yale in 1758, and. became the first lawyer in Great Barrington. But when the sound of war was heard, he sprang to arms, and died defending his country, at White Plains, October 26, 1776. He was but thirty-seven years of age when he fell. His wife, Electa Williams, was a half-sister of Ephraim Williams, who founded Williams College. The college was formally opened in 1793. An older brother of Colonel Hopkins was the famous theologian of Great Barrington, Dr. Samuel Hopkins, whose system of divinity is still held in honor in the theological world, and whose great purpose seems to have reappeared in his great-nephew. The father of Mark Hopkins, Archibald Hopkins, was a farmer in Stockbridge, - we may be sure one of the sterling kind. He lived to see his son at the head of Williams College, and died in January, 1839, at the age of seventy-three. wife was Mary Curtis of Stockbridge, a woman of "uncommon strength and excellence of character." When in her youth she attended the first commencement of the college, in 1795, she little realized that half a century later a son of hers would be its honored president. Mary Curtis bore to Archibald Hopkins three sons, but no daughters. One of these sons gave promCopyright, 1890, by New England Magazine Company, Boston. All rights reserved.

Mark Hopkins was born in the town of Stockbridge, on February 4, 1802, and died at Williamstown on the 17th of June, 1887. Like a shock of corn fully ripe he came to the end, and met death as the tired child meets and embraces sleep. God gave him his birth and appointed him to live in the midst of some of the finest scenery of our land. Stockbridge nestles between the mountains, and the little boy looked up reverently and heard the hills calling each other to praise and worship. Do we wonder that this mountain farmer boy in after years should exclaim: "I, too, am a mystic"? So great and luminous a soul, with the mountains about him and the stars

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ise of becoming a noted artist, but died too early for the realization of the promise. The other two, Albert and Mark, were long and intimately related to Williams College, and its success was largely due to their self-sacrificing, enthusiastic, and unwearied labors. Professor Albert Hopkins was a worthy colaborer of his older and greater brother.

We may be sure that such parents would look well to the education of their sons. The farmer saw in his oldest boy the promise of greater things than a quiet farmer's life would satisfy. He saw the boy developing a strong, healthy body, in the pure mountain air. But he was developing something else. A great thirst for knowledge dominated him. The boy who as a man was to lead hundreds of young men into the higher and broader realms of thought was already beginning to feel his growing powers, and to long for entrance into those realms himself.

The

In his address delivered a year after Dr. Hopkins's death, his life-long friend, the venerable and revered jurist, David Dudley Field, recalls the days of their common boyhood. Through his reminiscent eyes we see the three friends - young Field, and Morgan (later the distinguished Oberlin professor), and Mark Hopkins students together at Stockbridge. latter was at this time (1819) a lad of seventeen years, and certainly they were all, as Mr. Field phrases it, "lovers of knowledge and untiring in its pursuit." Besides studying here, he spent some time at Clinton, New York, and at Lenox Academy. In the fall of 1821 he entered Williams as a sophomore, and three years later graduated, the valedictorian of his class. This was under the presidency of Dr. Griffin.

The question of a profession being now before the young valedictorian, he began to think seriously of a medical career.

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