Read Ebook: Elijah Kellogg the Man and His Work Chapters from His Life and Selections from His Writings by Mitchell Wilmot Brookings Editor

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The Anchor of Hope 361

Preached at the Second Parish Church, Portland, August 5, 1900, "Old Home Week."

A Prayer 367

Memorial Day, 1883, Brunswick.

VERSE:

From "The Phantoms of the Mind" 373

The Demon of the Sea 374

Portland 378

An Ode 379

Written for the Semi-centennial Celebration at Bowdoin College, August 31, 1852.

A Hymn 381

Written for the Celebration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Boston Seaman's Friend Society, May 28, 1856.

True Poetry's Task 382

MISCELLANEOUS:

Memories of Longfellow 387

Ben Bolt 394

Ma'am Price 404

The Discontented Brook 413

COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS 423

FACING PAGE

Mrs. Eunice McLellan Kellogg. Mother of Elijah Kellogg 28

House on Cumberland Street, Portland, Maine, in which Elijah Kellogg lived when a boy 48

Elijah Kellogg's Church at Harpswell, Maine 56

Hannah Pearson Pomeroy Kellogg. Wife of Elijah Kellogg 68

Elijah Kellogg at 43. 1856 80

Elijah Kellogg's Home at Harpswell, Maine 114

View of the Kellogg Homestead, Harpswell, Maine 140

Aunt Betsy and Uncle William Alexander, for fifty years nearest neighbors and dear friends of Elijah Kellogg 168

Casco Bay as seen near Kellogg Homestead, Harpswell, Maine 188

Eleanor Batchelder. Daughter and granddaughter of Elijah Kellogg 202

Elijah Kellogg at 77. 1890 288

Elijah Kellogg at 80. 1893 306

Interior View of Elijah Kellogg's Church at Harpswell, Maine 356

Elijah Kellogg at 86. 1899 384

ELIJAH KELLOGG: THE BOY

GEORGE LEWIS

It is much easier to read the boy after you see and know the man than it is to read the man when you see and know only the boy. Manhood may be the unfolding of the various forces and dispositions of boyhood, but this unfolding must take place before the boyhood itself can be comprehended. The mill must grind the wheat into flour and the flour be baked and eaten before we can know how good the kernels of wheat are. So we must see Elijah Kellogg as a man before we can fairly estimate him as a lad. When we hear him preach or when we read some of his books, then we know there was something in him when a child more than mere roguery and fun. Genius was there. Powers and faculties were there which, when trained by judgment and directed by piety, made him the preacher to whom men and women loved to listen, and the writer of books that captivated the hearts of all boys.

Elijah Kellogg, Jr., had a good deal come to him from his father's side of the house. He also had a good deal come to him from his mother's side. This mother of his had once been Eunice McLellan. Her father was Captain Joseph McLellan and her mother was Mary, daughter of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, who had been among the earliest settlers of Gorham, Maine. Eunice, therefore , was a McLellan of the McLellans. The family were Scotch-Irish people, and were descended from old Sir Hugh, who was knighted in the year 1515, and the race was one of strong family characteristics. Even at the present time they are somewhat clannish, and to this day throughout New England the name McLellan is regarded by him who bears it as a sort of patent of nobility; and all agree that there are few if any names in the country more worthy of respect and honor than that one.

Joseph McLellan was a born sailor if ever there was one, an adventurous rover of the seas, always happiest when on blue water with a good ship under his feet and a stiff breeze blowing him along his course. This man sent his own disposition down the family stream, and gave to his grandson Elijah a generous share of that same roving and adventurous spirit. The story is told that on the birth of an infant daughter to Joseph and Mary the parents decided to call her Esther, or as it was pronounced in those days, Easter. The babe was taken to the church that she might be baptized at the hands of the Rev. Mr. Deane. At the font the name of the child was handed to the clergyman, Easter, upon which he broke out, "Easter! Easter! That is no good name for a girl. Call her after my wife. Call her Eunice. Eunice, I baptize thee," etc. The deed was done, and the child was Eunice in spite of both father and mother. The baby thus curiously named became in due time the wife of Parson Kellogg and the mother of the subject of this sketch. The McLellans were a canny folk. They had fought for Scottish liberty in many a sharp tug with the Saxons in the old days. They had helped fight the battles of the Covenanters at a later period, and now in the eighteenth century, transferred to America, they still kept up the fight and played their part on many a field, from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

Blood will tell. Family traits will be transmitted. Sons will in some degree resemble sires. With an ancestry on both sides like that sketched above, it is no great wonder that the subject of this volume became the man he did. He had a good start. There was in him a goodly fund of inherited gifts. In the book,"Good Old Times," which is Mr. Kellogg's story of the McLellan family , the author lets us see how largely his own personal character was formed and his whole life influenced by the traditions and stories of the men and women of the family, recounted as those stories were at the fireside in the winter evenings, and told over again in the daytime as men and boys were doing their work in the woods and in the fields. The boy was perfectly happy when listening to these tales of pioneer life, made up as they largely were of homely and commonplace incidents and yet of really adventurous deeds. They were tales of conflict with the Indians, in which the McLellan fairness and good sense always won the respect of the savages and in most cases secured their good will and good treatment; of encounters with bears and wolves and other wild beasts, where man's craft and skill gained the victory; and experiences with cold and hunger and hardships of the wilderness, in which Christian faith and the McLellan pluck overcame all odds and achieved a good measure of prosperity. Things like these were the folk-lore of the Gorham people rather than stories of round tables and fairies and ghosts and witches. This boy, like Carlyle, came to have a great admiration for the "man who could do things." The ideal hero of Elijah Kellogg's early boyhood was the hearty, warm-hearted, rough-handed, whole-souled pioneer who never turned his back upon a foe, whether biped or quadruped, and who never blenched in the face of a difficulty or a danger. He was the man who had in himself resources that were always called out and brought into exercise when obstacles were encountered, and invariably rose superior to the obstacles and made the man complete master of the situation, however bad that situation appeared. As he would have phrased it, he liked the man who never got whipped. The white man who could outwit an Indian or outhug a bear or outrun a pack of wolves was a man to be admired. The man who could fell a forest and clear a farm and put the soil to the production of corn and wheat was a man to be admired. This hero of Kellogg's childhood was never entirely dethroned from the heart of the man. To the end of his days he loved that man who, using his own native strength, could bridle and ride the storm, or over the rudest billows of the ocean could bring his vessel into port.

It is almost superfluous to say that the man who wrote such books for boys as are the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove series of stories was himself, when a lad, what would be called to-day an irrepressible. Without the least spice of malice or any suggestion of real harm in his nature, Elijah Kellogg was as full of mischief as a spring is of water, and it was simply impossible for parents and guardians to keep him within the bounds of Puritan propriety. It weighed not one jot with him that grave ministers and dignified elders of the church were among his forbears. It never occurred to him that because his father was a clergyman therefore he, the boy, should not go with other boys on Sunday morning to enjoy a frolic and take a swim in the waters of Back Cove, well out of sight from the parsonage windows, though of course such things on the Lord's Day were strictly forbidden. Elijah's proclivities were well known, and many were the family traps that were set for his ensnarement. But he had great facility for getting out of scrapes as well as getting into them. He did not, however, always escape detection. On one occasion, for example, the Sunday morning swim and games had been too fascinating for his boyish discretion, and had held him at the water until the public services for the morning at the church had closed. Elijah went home to meet his father, who had missed the boy from his proper seat in the family pew. That meeting between father and son can be more easily imagined than described, especially if the reader happens to be the child of a stern Puritan church-goer, and has himself been guilty of escapades on Sunday. To the question, "Where have you been this morning?" the boy replied without hesitation that he had been to the Methodist meeting. He heard his father preach every Sunday, and he had become a little tired of hearing one voice, and he wanted to hear what some other man had to say. Of course the next question was, "What was the preacher's text?" Elijah was ready for this and at once gave chapter and verse and repeated the passage. But the inquisition did not stop here; he must now give some account of the sermon. This seemed a perfectly easy matter to the young culprit. He had heard a good many sermons, and he felt very sure that he could report one even though he had not listened to it at all. But here he was caught. He had never heard anything but the rigid, old-school, Calvinistic doctrines, and it never entered his head that one minister did not always preach like another. It was therefore a sound Calvinistic sermon that this young reporter put into the mouth of the Methodist minister. He was soon brought up short with the paternal remark: "Elijah, stop right there. Now I know you are lying. No Methodist minister ever preached like that. Your whole story is false. You have spent your morning down by the water."

When Elijah was some ten or eleven years old he was taken to Gorham, and spent some months in the home of Mrs. Lothrop Lewis. Mrs. Lewis had a young daughter whom she wished put into a Portland school, and an exchange of children was made with the Kelloggs, they taking the girl into their home and Mrs. Lewis taking the boy into hers. This exchange was in many respects a grateful one to the boy. The country was the place for him. There was more freedom there, more room and more chance for fun than in town. Perhaps, too, the fact that his father was nine miles away had its alleviations, for the presence of a father, however dearly he was loved, was a damper on the spirit of prankishness. While with Mrs. Lewis, Elijah certainly made mischief for everybody, but at the same time he made friends of everybody, for none could help loving the bright and lively fellow. In due time the boy went back to Portland. But the city was no place for a lad like him. He chafed under its restraints, and cared but little for its schools. He was like a sea-gull shut up in a cage. As the imprisoned gull pines for the freedom of wind and wave so did the heart of Elijah Kellogg long for the free winds and the rolling waters and the ships that went sailing away to distant ports. It was a longing that could not be suppressed, and no one can really blame him that before he was thirteen years old he had found his way on board a ship and become a sailor in downright earnest. I am sure that the boys who read his books are not sorry that the hand that wrote those stories gained some of its cunning by pulling ropes, furling and unfurling sails, taking his trick at the wheel, and sharing actively in whatever pertained to the handling and management of vessels. He loved the sea, and was fascinated by the strange sights and sounds of foreign countries. He was a keen observer for a boy just entering his teens, and he gained much valuable knowledge as he wandered round the world borne along by the wings of a ship. But in his roving he never for one moment forgot his home. His heart was warm and true to the friends who were there. Letters written to his father from different quarters of the world are now in existence, and they bear full testimony to his ardent affection for home and friends. His love for friends was perhaps the strongest element of his nature, even stronger than his love of adventure, and in due time that love brought him back from his travels no longer to sail the seas except in small boats near the shore. In the story of "Charlie Bell," Mr. Kellogg has given us the picture of a boy's nature and disposition very much like his own.

Young Kellogg now put himself squarely down to hard work. He was older than are most boys when they take up the higher branches of study and begin to point their way definitely toward college, and he studied and worked in the Academy like one who is trying to make up for lost time. Such an intensity of application to books as was his at this time would have broken down many students; but Kellogg had a rare stock of good health and physical strength. He could well stand the strain of hard study. He had a well-knit frame. He never forgot how much of his own power of endurance he derived from his sturdy habits of toil in field and forest. He never forgot what a good physical basis for intellectual work manual labor gives one. In one of the college boys of his creation in the Whispering Pine series of books--Henry Morton--he shows the close connection between that young man's hoe and axe and his leadership of the college class. When Mr. Kellogg did this, he knew very well what he was talking about. Seventy years ago these things largely took the place of the athletic field of our time, and they filled that place very well, too. An old fogy may perhaps be pardoned for saying that in spite of all the excitement and glory of base-ball and foot-ball and running and leaping and boating, still the oil of hoe handle has its virtues as a medicine for students.

The life of young Kellogg shows distinctly two points of turning. The first one was when he wakened to the consciousness of his mental powers; when he realized something of what he was and determined that he would live on the high level of his intellectual self. A young horse that has in him the elements of speed to win a race on the track is trained for the track. The horse of great weight is put into the truck team. Animals are put in training, according to what they are. When Kellogg realized something of his own intellectual power, then he put himself in training for an intellectual life. He therefore went into the Academy that he might fit for college. After he had begun work in the Academy there came to him another consideration, and he asked the question: "Is a life of mere scholarship the highest and best one of which I am capable?" He felt surely that he ought to live up to the level of his mind, but he began to feel that there was some power in himself superior to that of brains and that that higher power should be developed and his own life should be devoted to that which was supreme. He felt strongly that he should not allow the spiritual element of his nature to lie dormant or go to waste. The diamond that is not ground on the wheel is just as hard as the one that is ground, but it does not sparkle and flash like the one on which the lapidary has spent his skill. The uncut diamond is like the man who stops in the classical school and does not care for the infinitely finer work that religion does for him. Mr. Kellogg felt that it was not enough for him to have power. The power that was in him should be dedicated to the divinest ends. It should be religiously dedicated and consecrated. This was the second turning of his life, and when it was made he had become an earnest and devoted Christian. He understood Christianity to mean that he should employ the faculties and powers of his own nature in helping other people to lead better and more wholesome lives. Christianity meant more than self-culture; it meant self-giving. If there was in himself a large element of fun, this was by no means to be suppressed or sent into eclipse. Religion would not maim him that way any more than religion would clip the wings of a robin and make a mole of the bird. But religion would take that spirit of fun and cause it to play and shine and work for the production of purer thinking and cleaner living and higher aiming among all young people.

Mr. Kellogg got through with the Academy, and entered Bowdoin College in 1836. It is worthy of note that in all his long life he never shuffled off the boy. It was not a mere memory on his part that he once was a boy. The genuine boy was never a memory with him, but was always a present reality. In one sense he was as young at eighty as he was at eighteen. Boys were his mates always. There are men who, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, never grow old, and Mr. Kellogg was one of them. To the very last his lips would smile and his eyes would twinkle as he recalled some prank of his boyhood or told tales of those who had been his companions on the ship and on the farm and in the school. He never forgot a friend, and he certainly never forgot a funny or laughable incident. His own perennial boyhood has cheered and made more noble an almost numberless band of young lives throughout the country, and may the time be long before the young people of the land shall cease to read his wholesome books.

COLLEGE AND SEMINARY

HENRY LELAND CHAPMAN

It was in 1836, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, that Elijah Kellogg entered Bowdoin College as a Freshman. His father had been one of the earliest and firmest friends of the college. As one of the Cumberland County Association of Ministers he had joined in the petition to the General Court of Massachusetts for the establishment of a collegiate institution in the province of Maine. When in answer to the petition of the ministers, and of the Court of Sessions of Cumberland County, the college was incorporated in 1794, Mr. Kellogg was named as one of the first board of overseers. Four years later he became a trustee, and continued to hold that official relation to the college until 1824. During his boyhood, therefore, and before he cherished any purpose or desire to enjoy its privileges, Elijah must have heard, within the family circle, much about the college which was so great an object of interest and pride to his father, as it was, indeed, to the whole community. It was but natural, therefore, when his purpose was seriously formed to seek a college training in preparation for his father's calling of the ministry, that Bowdoin, aside from its proximity to his home, should be the college of his choice. But his course collegeward was interrupted and delayed by various circumstances, and particularly by personal tastes that were quite other than scholastic. Always a lover of the sea, and delighting in the tales of sea life and adventure to which he listened from the lips of sailors themselves along the Portland wharves, it is not strange that the call of the sea sounded louder than any other in his ears. So, listening to the call, he shipped before the mast, and for three years lived the hard and perilous life of a sailor. It is true that the experience, which may have been useful to him in other ways also, was an admirable preparation for the brilliant service which he afterwards performed as chaplain of the Sailor's Home in Boston, but in the meantime it made him late in entering upon his college life. It is to be said, however, that of his thirty classmates six were as old as himself.

We must look to certain volumes of the Whispering Pines series, and particularly to the volumes entitled "The Spark of Genius," "The Sophomores of Radcliffe," and "The Whispering Pine," for a picture of his college life, true in its general features, and graphic like everything from Mr. Kellogg's pen. These books, which have been read with eager interest by so many generations of boys, describe Bowdoin College, its professors, students, customs, and manners as they were known to Elijah Kellogg during the years of his residence there from 1836 to 1840. If they seem to be devoted largely to a recital of pranks and mischief and practical jokes among the students, it is partly because such things made a stronger appeal to scheming brains, and youthful fellowship, and leisure hours in those days, before athletic sports enlisted, as they have since enlisted, the restless energy and high spirits and intense rivalry of college boys; and partly, also, it was because his native sense of humor and love of fun, his spirit of adventure and personal courage, constituted an ever present temptation to him to share or lead in enterprises which demanded wariness and cunning and pluck, and which promised the discomfiture of some boastful and unloved fellow-student, or the perplexed disapproval of the college authorities, or the entertainment of a college community always keenly appreciative of a diverting sensation. So alive was he to this phase of student activity, and so conspicuous was he among his mates for resourcefulness and courage, that he became, in the popular opinion of his time and in subsequent tradition, the hero of many an escapade with which he had no connection. One instance, however, of strenuous effort quite outside his college duties seems to be well authenticated, and will serve to show the kind of mischievous exploit which was attractive enough to enlist his cooperation.

The president of the college during the first three years of Kellogg's course was a man of great dignity and reserve. He held himself quite aloof from the students, neither inviting nor allowing any freedom of social intercourse. Partly on this account he was unpopular with the student body, and the solemn reserve in which he intrenched himself seemed, in their eyes, to make any infringement, however slight, of his personal dignity particularly humorous. There was much irreverent laughter, therefore, when it was whispered about on one occasion that the silk hat which the president was accustomed to wear, and which seemed the very crown and symbol of his formal stateliness, had been stolen, and was in the hands of some of the students. When it came to the ears of Kellogg he remarked that if he knew the boys that had the hat he would put it on the top of the chapel spire. Of course the interesting information was not long withheld from him, and in the darkness of a showery night he climbed sturdily up by the slender and insecure pathway of the lightning-rod, and placed the hat on the very top, where, in the morning, it met the dismayed vision of the president, and received the boisterous salutations of the college. That was Kellogg's contribution to the deed of mischief. To steal the hat was a petty and foolish trick, such as might be perpetrated by a half-witted person, a coward, or a thief; but to carry it through the darkness to the top of the chapel spire required a clear head, a stout heart, good muscle, and nerve, and these Elijah Kellogg possessed, both in youth and manhood.

In reading these books, which tell the substantial history of his life at Bowdoin, it is quite evident that, with all the interest he took in the pastimes and pranks of his associates, he was not unmindful of the high and serious purpose of a college course. He maintained a consistent ideal of personal integrity and helpfulness and truth. It is the repeated testimony of those who were in college with him that his influence upon his fellow-students was in a high degree stimulating and wholesome. "He was," says one who knew him well in the intimacy of college association, "universally popular, but he had his own chosen favorites, and one characteristic of him was his strong personal affection for them. His soul burned with love to those whom he loved. This was one secret of his power for good, for his influence upon them was always good." An unaffected scorn of what was mean or false, and an eagerness to recognize and to make the most of every good and generous trait in his companions, were as characteristic of him as was his light-hearted, fun-loving disposition, and it is easy to see why he won both the respect and love of those who were admitted to his friendship.

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