ble all his days,
I am afraid, after that entry in his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall was
chosen President, for his Piety."

There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable
countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown
older. Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-olds
three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale; but age
magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old people are
a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible,
it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved
features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details,
like so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be. The
middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint impressions
in my memory, but how grandly the procession of the old clergymen who
filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof,
marches before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David
Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy
over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster
of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant
mouth, which not even the "Sabbath" could subdue to the true Levitical
aspect; and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of "The Ladies'
Philosophy of Love. A Poem. 1797" (how I stared at him! he was the first
living person ever pointed out to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason
Harris of Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff
in hand, being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that
somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to
be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"),
already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and
downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors;
and that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched
the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards,
that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the
resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little
Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated,
reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in
wickedness or wit. Th