was the seen thing which was soon to pass away;—­behind it was the unseen mountain, glorious as the “great white throne” which should stand unmoved when fifty centuries of mist had flown away into nothingness.  This passage moved the audience prodigiously.  Many sat gazing at the tall pale orator before them through their tears.  The portrait of Dr. Adams hangs on my study wall—­alongside of the portrait of Chalmers—­and as I look at his majestic countenance now, I still seem to see him as on that Sabbath morning he stood before us, with the light of eternity beaming on his brow!

In the summer of 1845 I was strolling with my friend Littell (the founder of the Living Age), through the leafy lanes of Brookline, and we came to a tasteful church.  “That,” said Mr. Littell, “is the Harvard Congregational meeting house.  They have lately called a brilliant young Mr. Storrs, who was once a law student with Rufus Choate; he is a man of bright promise.”  Two years afterward I saw and heard that brilliant young minister in the pulpit of the newly organized Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn.  He had already found his place, and his throne.  He made that pulpit visible over the continent.  That church will be “Dr. Storrs’ church” for many a year to come.

Had that superbly gifted law student of Choate gone to the bar he would inevitably have won a great distinction, and might have charmed the United States Senate by his splendid eloquence.  Perhaps he learned from Choate some lessons in rhetoric and how to construct those long melodious sentences that rolled like a “Hallelujah chorus” over his delighted audiences.  But young Storrs chose the better part, and no temptation of fame or pelf allured him from the higher work of preaching Jesus Christ to his fellow men.  He was—­like Chalmers and Bushnell and Spurgeon—­a born preacher.  Great as he was on the platform, or on various ceremonial occasions, he was never so thoroughly “at home” as in his own pulpit; his great heart never so kindled as when unfolding the glorious gospel of redeeming love.  The consecration of his splendid powers to the work of the ministry helped to ennoble the ministry in the popular eye, and led young men of brains to feel that they could covet no higher calling.

One of the remarkable things in the career of Dr. Storrs was that by far the grandest portion of that career was after he had passed the age of fifty!  Instead of that age being, as to many others, a “dead line,” it was to him an intellectual birth line.  He returned from Europe—­after a year of entire rest—­and then, like “a giant refreshed by sleep,” began to produce his most masterly discourses and orations.  His first striking performance was that wonderful address at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Henry Ward Beecher’s pastorate in Plymouth Church, at the close of which Mr. Beecher gave him a grateful kiss before the applauding audience.  Not long after that Dr. Storrs delivered