In Miss Phelps’s case, one must believe in heredity and partly in Huxley’s statement that “we are automata propelled by our ancestors.”  Her grandfather, Moses Stuart, was Professor of Sacred Literature at Andover, a teacher of Greek and Latin, and a believer in that stern school of theology and teleology.  It was owing perhaps to a combination of severity in climatic and in intellectual environment that New England developed an austere type of scholars and theologians.  Their mental vision was focused on things remote in time and supernatural in quality, so much so that they often overlooked the simple and natural expression of their obligation to things nearby.  It sometimes happened that their tender and amiable characteristics were better known to learned colleagues with whom they were in intellectual sympathy, than to their own wives and children.  Sometimes their finer and more lovable qualities were first brought to the attention of their families when some distinguished professor or divine feelingly pronounced a funeral eulogy.

It’s a long way from the stern Moses Stuart, who believed firmly in hell and universal damnation and who, with Calvin, depicted infants a span long crawling on the floor of hell, to his gifted granddaughter, who, although a member of an evangelical church, wrote:  “Death and heaven could not seem very different to a pagan from what they seem to me.”  Her heart was nearly broken by the sudden death of her lover on the battlefield.  “Roy, snatched away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid out there in the wet and snow—­in the hideous wet and snow—­never to kiss him, never to see him any more.”  Her Gates Ajar when it appeared was considered by some to be revolutionary and shocking, if not wicked.  Now, we gently smile at her diluted, sentimental heaven, where all the happy beings have what they most want; she to meet Roy and find the same dear lover; another to have a piano; a child to get ginger snaps.  I never quite fancied the restriction of musical instruments in visions of heaven to harps alone.  They at first blister the fingers until they are calloused.  The afflicted washerwoman, whose only daughter had just died, was not in the least consoled by the assurance that Melinda was perfectly happy, playing a harp in heaven.  “She never was no musicianer, and I’d rather see her a-settin’ by my tub as she used to set when I was a-wringin’ out the clothes from the suds, than to be up there a-harpin’.”  Very different, as a matter of fact, were the instruments, more or less musical, around which New England families gathered on Sunday evenings for the singing of hymns and “sacred songs.”  Yet there was often real faith and sincere devotion pedalled out of the squeaking old melodeon.