Samuel Storrs, from the end of 1831 to August, 1834, was pursuing his theological studies, first at Andover, and finally at Princeton, latterly under the preceptorship of Professor Robert B. Patten, spending the vacation seasons teaching Greek and Sacred History, and to beginners Hebrew. August, 1834, he was licensed to preach on the recommendation of the Professors of Edgeville Seminary by the Middlesex Union Association, and was graduated September 10th of the same year. In 1835 he was appointed Tutor in Middlebury College, Vermont, but resigned the following year to take charge of the Classical Department of Cambridge Academy, New York, where he remained two years.

In 1838 he accepted a call to preach at West Dresden, Yates county, New York, and in 1840 settled at Painted Post, New York. It was soon after this that, contemplating entrance into foreign missionary work, he took a short course of practical medical instruction. In the summer of 1842-3 he preached in Ticonderoga,* New York, near Lake George, and from 1843 to 1846 he officiated in Brashear Falls, New York, very acceptably, having been installed Pastor of the Presbyterian Church formed under his ministry, but resigned in 1846 to accept the Secretaryship of the "Western Educational Society" at Auburn, New York.

In June, 1849, he accepted a call to the Presbyterian Church

Oliver M. Spencer who afterwards was U. S Consul at Genoa, Italy, and later U. S. Consul General at Melbourne, Australia, where he died in August, 1895. George E. Spencer, of another family, was Secretary of the Iowa State Senate of 1858; during the war he was Colonel of a loyal Alabama regiment, and after the war was elected U. S. Senator from Alabama.

*Recently workmen while digging near a grave in Ticonderoga found an old decayed box and near by a grave stone roughly inscribed “ Ye L' How." Rev. Joseph Cook, of Boston, the famous lecturer, who examined it with others, has expressed his conviction that it was the grave of Lord Howe, who was killed in that locality, although it was supposed he had been buried at Albany. Thus have two collateral descendants of the same ancestry been honorably associated at the same place in their antipodal capacities, one in war and one in peace.

of Iowa City, and was installed Pastor by the Presbytery of Des Moines.

Mr. Howe, in the course of his work in the ministry was tractable to the advice of his friends. On account of the delicacy of his health he at one time desired to enter the foreign missionary field. It was Rev. Lyman Beecher,. father of Henry Ward Beecher, who dissuaded him from this course.

On coming to Iowa City, he found what is now locally known as the "Old Stone Church," in a partially finished state, and set himself about collecting funds for its completion. His name is therefore doubly associated with this "venerable pile, so old it seemed only not to fall," for here the State Historical Society, (of which Samuel Storrs Howe was Corresponding Secretary and the first editor of its quarterly publication, The Annals of Iowa,) had its Cabinet and Library from 1868 to 1882. For more than fifty years its grey walls have turned the hurricane and blizzard, its vaulted dome trembled with pulpitish appeals and the resonance of prayer and anthem. But before being deserted by the Historical Society it had become the haunt of mice and rats which have left their impress on many a newspaper file and book-cover.

In 1862 Mr. Howe was elected Corresponding Secretary of the Historical Society. He saw the importance of the Society having a publication of its own as a medium of exchange with other similar societies, and the result was the issue of The Annals of Iowa, the first number bearing date January, 1863, a quarterly, at first of forty-eight pages, but later enlarged to eighty pages. Its forty-eighth number, dated October, 1874, was the last of this series published. (It may be here stated parenthetically that for the years 1868 and 1869 Dr. Sanford W. Huff, who in 1870 married the niece and protegé of Mr. Howe, Miss Laura S. Nickerson, was the Corresponding Secretary of the Historical Society and the editor of the Annals.)

It was about this time that Mr. Howe was interested in the collection of Indian relics for the Smithsonian Institution, and

it was in this way that the thought which he cherished of preserving the early pioneer and Indian history of Iowa had form and effect, until now it has become a subject sufficiently important in the minds of our people to secure the approval of the Legislature for the establishment of a second organization for its promotion.

His work was rather desultory and perhaps lacking in method, for he was a scholar and student and was unversed in business formulas, and for this reason the good that he effected being scattered over a large field is hard to aggregate and present in its totality. He was still more careless of his own personal interests. With considerable opportunity to acquire wealth he died destitute. No suggestion of misappropriation could ever apply to him. He was a mathematician, a classical scholar, a student whose field of research was not bounded by a curriculum.

He was a bachelor. A cross in love in early life cast a shadow over his path, but it was not one which the sun of Christian hope could not dispel when it shone upon it. The vows he took on entering the ministry were faithfully kept. No scandal ever soiled his gown. He was chaste as one feeding on the vitex berry. Though standing for Presbyterianism he was no bigot. He said the most comfortable sacrament he had ever taken was administered by a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church whilst he kneeled between two lady parishioners. Orator, teacher, author, antiquary—" all things by turns," although capable if not eminent in all, he has left little distinctively impressive of his personality except in the memory of his friends.

One of the last rôles in which Mr. Howe appeared was as editor of "Howe's Annals," a faint revival of the old periodical, the first number of which appeared in 1883, and was continued at irregular intervals for three years, when failing health compelled its abandonment.

Mr. Howe was a kindly, genial man with his friends, and he had that faculty of adapting himself and his discourse to fit

his company which is not given to every one. Like the toad, locked in the rock of ignorant companionship he seemed dull and shriveled, but when liberated into the enlightened sphere of educated society he expanded into the dimensions of a genius.

In the autumn of 1887 Mr. Howe was invited to Castleton, Vermont, as the last living member of the Academy of his class, it being the centennial celebration of the institution, at which he was able to deliver an address.

Mr. Howe's health continued gradually to fail till October 26, 1888, when he died at his home in Iowa City, in his eighty-first year.

For love's sweet sake oh, dear ones-dearer now-
I fain would tarry; linger yet the while,
That I might clasp again your waiting hands

And warm my heart in sunshine of your smile.

A fate impels! I dare not disobey;

It rules my spirit with untempered power,
By its stern voice I know Gethsemane

Is with me now and here-this very hour.

Farewell! The blessed Easter bells now fling
Their rain of melody upon the air,

I heed them not; my listening soul shall hear
Their sweet triumphant music otherwhere.

Oh, bells of immortality, thy solace pour
Into my troubled spirit, failing fast,

I seek the Hand that leadeth evermore

When hopes and joys of earth are overpast.

UT the storm on the mountains gathers itself, every fold of it involved with thunder, doing its mighty work in its own dominion, nor snatching from you for an instant the abiding peace of the transcendent sky.” Observe, in this description of Mr. Ruskin of a storm-cloud on the Alps, that it "gathers itself;" it is not acted upon but acts. In the tumultuous heart of it are the swift will and violence of passion; its anger, moreover, being emphasized by the "peace" of the infinite, "transcendent sky." In the literal truth of things, there can be in the cloud and in the sky neither rage nor rest; but into the unconscious agitation of the one and the unconscious calm of the other is breathed the poetic breath of life. Again, the aspiration of George Eliot to

"Join the choir invisible

Whose music is the gladness of the world,"

is not only poetic but poetry. For, to the spiritual ear, the "gladness of the world" yields more heavenly strains than the anthems of cathedral choirs, and the thought is expressed in the melodious cadence of poetic form.

Mrs. Isadore Baker has written purely poetic lines. And if some benignly despotic, literary censorship should strangle at their birth the limping commonplace and modulated ravings of stupid and disordered brains, the excellence of her gift