of emancipation by the president is an established fact. Better than our fears, swifter than our hopes, the nation, by its acknowledged head, has uttered the fiat of Freedom. And we do not see how its execution is to be avoided. It would have pleased us better had the president proclaimed emancipation on the instant rather than after the lapse of an hundred days. It would have been more just, more dignified, more manly, and more Christian. As a war measure, it would have been more effective. It would have had the military advantage of a blow struck instead of a blow threatened,—a gain of time, if nothing more. But we will not stand upon trifles, nor pronounce authoritatively upon measures. Nor shall we now undertake to discuss the new phase of emancipation presented by this proclamation. The great deed, we feel sure, is done. Henceforth our country may truly be called a free country. Although the scope of the president's proclamation is prospective, and many practical details in regard to modes and measures are yet to be settled, we are willing to wait and to trust the future for their right adjustment. Ninety days will soon pass. Meanwhile, what we had written weeks before the appearance of the proclamation, though it may seem deficient in the warmth and coloring which that instrument would now give to words, may not be less appropriate or useful in assisting in the practical management of the question before us than if it had been inspired by a document of such grave and lasting import. The march of events is swifter than the march of men. The victories of opinion are more rapid far, and more decisive, than the victories of our arms. Behind our great host of panoplied men, and all the outward equipage and muniments of visible war, God has been setting in array the forces of thought and principle; and the movement of those forces, during the last twelve months, has been grander and more august than that of all our earth-shaking legions. Such a change as has been wrought in public sentiment, such an advance as has been made in the general judgment in respect to slavery, is wonderful to behold. "This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." These forces of opinion, these forces of God, are never de

Y

feated. They never retreat. We have felt all along that there was this higher and grander conflict waging under God's immediate control, and that in comparison with it the strife for the reëstablishment of national authority and territorial integrity became dwarfed and of minor importance. We have felt all along that, until the nation should come to look at human slavery in its moral aspects, and to deal with it as a moral matter and not as a question of policy only, the triumphing of our arms would be but for a season, and any peace made with the rebels would be but a cheat. Now we feel that the Lord of Hosts will be with us, and that out of this Red Sea we shall come in triumph. Righteousness and peace shall kiss each other. It only needs now to stand by the right, to stand by principle, and though the waves of this trouble that is tossing the land may not subside at once, the time is not far off when, with a voice that is from above, there shall be proclaimed,—Peace.

ARTICLE VIII.—EDWARD C. IIERRICK.

Ir is only a few months since our pages gave to the public a brief memoir of Professor Larned of Yale College, who had been suddenly cut down in the midst of his greatest usefulness. And now, by a death almost equally sudden, another valued officer of that Institution has been called away. With what startling frequency has death of late taken his victims from the same small group of associates in office! It is only ten years since Professor Kingsley, full of years and in the ripeness of scholarship and of character, was summoned to depart, and, although for many years before the occurrence of that sad event the officers of the college had enjoyed a singular exemption from the visitations of death, yet, in the short interval which has since elapsed, no less than twelve men, who had together held professorships in the various departments of the University, have passed away. Three of these had previously withdrawn from the college to other places of residence, and one other had ceased from active duties as an instructor by reason of the infirmities of age. But now all of these are numbered with the dead:-Norton, Stanley, Taylor, Goodrich, Olmsted, Gibbs, Larned, Bissell, Tully, Storrs, Beers, Ives. And last, Mr. Herrick has fallen,-not a professor in any department of instruction, it is true, but a most useful officer, and worthy to be intimately associated, as he was, with the most honored of those who have been, or who continue to be, connected with the Institution. A fearful mortality!

But the friends of the college are not left unconsoled. These departed men have left an abiding influence behind them; and they have, by their genius, their achievements in the various departments of science and letters, their eminent usefulness or rare promise, as well as by their faithful lives, left a rich and honorable legacy to the institution with which, while they lived, they were in so great a degree identified.

And we feel sure that no one of them all has left a fairer or even, take him for all in all, a more enviable record than Mr. Herrick. He was a man of rare natural endowments, both of mind and heart; and what nature bestowed he improved with unvarying fidelity, until he was called by the Great Giver to render an account of his stewardship. In choosing, so far as he was free to choose, the objects on which to bestow his labor, he showed an elevated mind, but he was also an example of faithfulness in the performance of the most trivial and the humblest duties, whether those duties were required by the stations which he successively occupied in life, or by an ever wakeful, all-including spirit of charity. His labors did not fail of success. As a man of science he achieved more than most scientific men achieve, although he was not by profession engaged in such pursuits. In literature he made unusual attainments. And in self-culture, which was with him as much an instinct as it was a conscious aim, he became one of the best of men. Our limits will not permit us to enter into the details of his scientific labors, nor would it be altogether suitable in a journal of this kind. We shall mainly content ourselves with giving an outline of his life, and a brief delineation of his character.

EDWARD CLAUDIUS HERRICK was born in New Haven, February 24th, 1811. His father was the Rev. Claudius Herrick, a man of the rarest virtues, of whom it may be said almost without qualification, that none name him but to praise him. He was born in 1775, in Southampton, Long Island, where his ancestors for four generations had lived and died, was graduated at Yale College in 1798, and, after a course of theological study, was settled as pastor of the Congregational Church in Woodbridge, Conn., but having been compelled by the failure of his health to abandon the laborious life of a clergyman, he opened in New Haven a school for young ladies, of which he was the honored and successful teacher, till, in the year 1831, he closed his most beneficent and amiable life.

Rev. Mr. Herrick found a fit companion of his life in Miss Hannah Pierpont of New Haven, to whom he was married in 1802. She was a descendant of the Rev. James Pierpont,

pastor of the First Church in New Haven and one of the three clergymen who, in 1698, planned the founding of Yale College. Mrs. Herrick survived her husband nearly thirty years, during which period she was never separated from her son Edward. Her life illustrated the quiet controlling power of Christian principle. She was in sympathy with all Christian enterprises, and she was always willing to deny herself that she might aid them, while her only self-indulgenee was the indulgence of kindness. The law of kindness was in her heart and on her tongue. She lived to old age, till like ripened corn she was ready to be gathered. But no death ever caused sincerer sorrow than did hers to the son to whom she had been for so many years an object of true filial love. We will not undertake to describe that most manifest grief which smote his heart when those "lips" no more “had language," and that form, long bent with years, had to be borne away at last, to be buried out of his sight.

Mr. Herrick's early training was such as might have been expected from such parents as he had, and from the circumstances in which he was placed. Everything around him, both within the precincts of home and beyond them, was suggestive continually of a superior intellectual culture. It can hardly have been without its influence upon him that during his earliest years the nearest neighbor and friend of his father was the venerable Dr. Dwight, and that throughout his childhood and youth the gentlemen engaged in instruction in the College, under the very shadow of which he dwelt, were also his father's familiar acquaintances. And the daily and constant sight of these hundreds of youth, all engaged in the pursuit of liberal knowledge, and among them soon his two older and only brothers, must have been sufficient to inspire him with a desire for the same employ ments. He could, however, hardly have needed any such external impulses, for he always seemed to have received from nature a keen appetite for knowledge of every kind. He of course grew in knowledge. He was a successful student in school, and he remembered and repeatedly referred to the delightful exhilaration with which he used to accomplish some of