During the six years that I spent in Princeton College and in the Seminary (between 1838 and 1846) I came into close acquaintance with, and I heard very often, the two great orators of the Alexander family.  Dr. Archibald Alexander, the father of a famous group of sons, was a native of Virginia—­had listened to Patrick Henry in his youth; had married the daughter of the eloquent “Blind Preacher,” Rev. James Waddell, and even when as a young minister he had preached in Hanover, New Hampshire.  Daniel Webster, then a student in Dartmouth College, predicted his future eminence.  The students in the Seminary were wont to call him playfully, “The Pope,” for we had unbounded confidence in his sanctified common-sense.  I always went to him for counsel.  His insight into the human heart was marvelous; and in the line of close experimental preaching, he has not had his equal since the days of President Edwards.  He put the impress of his powerful personality on a thousand ministers who graduated from Princeton Seminary.

In his lecture-desk and in the pulpit he was simplicity itself.  His sermons were like the waters of Lake George, so pellucid that you could see every bright pebble far down in the depths; a child could comprehend him, yet a sage be instructed by him.  His best discourses were extemporaneous, and he had very little gesture, except with his forefinger, which he used to place under his chin, and sometimes against his nose in a very peculiar manner.  With a clear piping voice and colloquial style he held his audience in rapt attention, disdaining all the tricks of sensational oratory.  Twice I heard him deliver his somewhat celebrated discourse on “The Day of Judgment;” it was a masterpiece of solemn eloquence, in which sublimity and simplicity were combined in a way that I have never seen equaled He used to say that the right course for an old man to keep his mind from senility was to produce some piece of composition every day; and he continued to write his practical articles for the religious press until he was almost four-score.  What an impressive funeral was his on that bright October afternoon, in 1851, when two hundred ministers gathered in that Westminster Abbey of Presbyterianism, the Princeton Cemetery!  His ashes slumber beside those of Witherspoon, Davies, Hodge, McCosh and Jonathan Edwards.

Among the six sons who stood that day beside that grave, the most brilliant by far was the third son, Joseph Addison Alexander.  Dr. Charles Hodge said of him:  “Taking him all in all, he was the most gifted man with whom I have ever been personally acquainted,” In childhood, such was his precocity that he knew the Hebrew alphabet at six years of age (I am afraid that some ministers do not know it at sixty); and he could read Latin fluently when he was only eight!  Of his wonderful feats of memory I could give many illustrations; one was that on the day that I was matriculated in the Seminary with fifty other students, Professor Alexander went over to Dr. Hodge’s study, and repeated to him every one of our names!  When using manuscript in the pulpit, he frequently turned the leaves backward instead of forward, for he knew all the sermon by heart!  His commentaries—­quite too few—­remain as monuments of his profound scholarship, and some of his articles in the Princeton Review sparkled with the keenest wit.