dive into the college librarj', and fish up huge tomes in Latin and Greek, which he would lug off to his room, and go into them with as much eagerness as a boarding-school girl goes into a novel. His power of speech also began to attract attention. He was the best debater, if not the best writer, in Divinity Hall. He finished his term at the divinity school in the sum- mer of 1836, and, after preaching as a candidate in Barn- stable, Greenfield, Northfield, and other vacant parishes in Massachusetts, accepted a call to settle in West Rox- bury, where he was ordained in June, 1837. This was a quiet country place. His parish was small, and com- posed mostly of plain people, and his salary of six hun- dred dollars afforded no bewildering temptations; but the village was near Boston and Cambridge, and prom- ised leisure for the work on which his heart was set. The absorbing pursuit of this period was the literature of the Bible. He devoted a share of his time to the Egyptian and Phcenician alphabets; he dallied with ancient inscriptions and coins; the Orphic poems at- tracted his attention ; but the Bible literature led all the rest. Still, all literature in his eyes was sacred literature. All facts were divine facts. He came to look upon man as a progressive being, and developed by studies a theory very much like that of the mod- ern development theorists, Lubbock, Tylor, Hittel, etc. ; only he was more considerate to Christianity. Parker's journal is filled with curious inquiries into the mysteri- ous phenomena of nature and life. To the last he was always gleaning accounts of miracle and prophecy. His reading was universal in its range. He took up Chap- man the poet, Herrick, Wither, Drummond, Wotton, Flecknoe, Surrey, Suckling. There was honey for him in every flower. The earlj^ Christian hymns, the Mi- lesian fables, Cupid and Psyche, CampaneDa, biogra- phies of Swedenborg and other famous mj-stics were his mental recreations. Hume, Gibbon, Robertson were trifles ; Schleiermacher, Bouterwek, Baur, Hegel, Leib- nitz, Laplace were more serious. Bopp's Comparative Grammar, Karcher's Analecfa, Meiner's Historij of Re- ligions, Rimannus's History of Atheism (Latin) are ex- amples of the solid reading. The books that were not at hand, Abelard, for instance, and Averroes, he sought from afar. Wilkinson and Rosellini were familiar to him. Hesiod he commented on minutely. Plato was a constant companion. No book is mentioned without some notice of its contents and critical remarks. So extensive was his course of study that the truthfulness of his statements have been called in question ; and Prof. Prentice, in his reviews {Meth. Qu. Rev. Jan.-Oct. 1873), after detailed examination, pronounces Parker guilty of exaggeration and verj' inaccurate in scholar- ship. " The truth is, that accurate scholarship was not his gift. . . . Jlr. Parker read too much, his life through, to read well ; he attempted too many languages to know any accurately. . . . The merest inspection will show not only that his mode of life was unfavorable to study, but also that he had more than enough to busy his mind with." We cannot endorse this harsh critique. Theodore Parker's intellectual ability has been sur- passed very rarely in this country. With naturally great powers, he had subjected himself to a thorough discipline, till he attained to a surprising degree of mental strength and vigor. His memory was very re- tentive ; and it is said that he could repeat a whole volume of poetry, and woidd often learn by heart a poem of four or five hundred lines from a single read- ing. It had been carefully cultivated, but not, as is too often the case, to the neglect of the other faculties. We must confess, however, that Parker's range of stud- ies was too vast and too superficial to avail much, and that his intellectual constitution unfitted him for origi- nal work. True, his intellect was keen and subtle, and bored into everything, determined to find the kernel, if it had any. But it had no constructive power, and its range was lateral and horizontal, and lacked both height and depth. He saw sharply through sham reasoning
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in other people, could prick all wind-bladders with the needles of his criticism and satire, or, as Mr. Beecher has it, " he had a habit of striking at the root of things with very vigorous blows," and hence was quick to run down a falsehood, but he was just as impotent to estab- lish a truth. His intellect was colored mainly by his tempestuous sensibilities. He had not even enough of the intuitive faculty, notwithstanding his abundant nomenclature about the consciousness, which he learn- ed from Kant, for intellectual sympathy, and hence he could not enter into other people's beliefs so as to under- stand them and get their outlook.