“I have never approved,” I think he said, “of the Special Course.”

For the Professor believed in no short-cut to the pulpit; but pleaded for all the education, all the opportunity, all the culture, all the gifts, all the graces, possible to a man’s privilege or energy, whereby to fit him to preach the Christian religion.  But, like other professors, he could not always have his way.

It ought to be said, perhaps, that, beside the self-made or self-making man, there always sat upon the old benches in the lecture-room a certain proportion of gentlemen born and bred to ease and affluence, who had chosen their life’s work from motives which were, at least, as much to be respected as the struggles of the converted newsboy or the penitent expressman.

Take her at her dullest, I think we were very fond of Andover; and though we dutifully improved our opportunities to present ourselves in other circles of society, yet, like fisher-folk or mountain-folk, we were always uneasy away from home.  I remember on my first visit to New York or Boston—­and this although my father was with me—­quietly crying my eyes out behind the tall, embroidered screen which the hostess moved before the grate, because the fire-light made me so homesick.  Who forgets his first attack of nostalgia?  Alas! so far as this recorder is concerned, the first was too far from the last.  For I am cursed (or blessed) with a love of home so inevitable and so passionate as to be nothing less than ridiculous to my day and generation—­a day of rovers, a generation of shawl-straps and valises.

“Do you never want to stay?” I once asked a distinguished author whose domestic uprootings were so frequent as to cause remark even in America.

“I am the most homesick man who ever lived,” he responded sadly.  “If I only pass a night in a sleeping-car, I hate to leave my berth.”

“You must have cultivated society in Andover,” an eminent Cambridge writer once said to me, with more sincerity of tone than was to be expected of the Cambridge accent as addressed to the Andover fact.  I was young then, and I remember to have answered, honestly enough, but with what must have struck this superior man as unpardonable flippancy: 

“Oh, but one gets tired of seeing only cultivated people!”

I have thought of it sometimes since, when, in other surroundings, the memory of that peaceful, scholarly life has returned poignantly to me.

When one can “run in” any day to homes like those on that quiet and conscientious Hill, one may not do it; but when one cannot, one appreciates their high and gentle influence.

One of the historic figures of my day in Andover was Professor Park.  Equally eminent both as a preacher and as a theologian, his fame was great in Zion; and “the world” itself had knowledge of him, and did him honor.

He was a striking figure in the days which were the best of Andover.  He was unquestionably a genius; the fact that it was a kind of genius for which the temper of our times is soon likely to find declining uses gives some especial interest to his name.