Life and Character of Sir William Pepperrell, by LUTHER DAME, 161 PARTS X, XI, XII. HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. JAN., FEB., AND MARCH., 1884. VOLUME XXI. SALEM, MASS.: PRINTED FOR THE ESSEX INSTITUTE. 1884. HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS OF THE ESSEX INSTITUTE. VOL. XXI. JAN., FEB., MAR., 1884. Nos. 1, 2, 3. MEMORIAL OF CHARLES T. BROOKS. BIRTH AND BOYHOOD, BY E. B. WILLSON. NEVER was there a full river beautiful between its banks, and made serviceable to men by the carriage to and fro of themselves and their goods, that they did not at length go searching for its source and explore its course. In the same way it happens that when a man, living forty-six years by the sea at Newport, R. I., becomes as preacher, scholar, poet, writer, man of rare and memorable qualities, beautiful and strong, an object of admiring regard to many, inquirers come at length to our Salem streets asking the elders: where did this life begin, and how? Up about the region where the stream starts and is small, and the observers are few, it attracts but little notice it may even be in dispute which are the chief tributaries. Not much in themselves, except to a few farmers whose lands they beautify and irrigate, it is only when they acquire importance as the headwaters of the deep and broad flowing stream below, that they are traced and mapped with painstaking attention. It not being known yet, or even clearly knowable, that the Salem boy is the beginning of the Newport man that is to be, his childhood and boyhood pass here without special notice in their unfolding and events, except as now and then one, teacher or fellow-student it may be, having occasion or opportunity for closer observation than the rest, sees a promise, not of just that which will come later, but of something not of the commonplace to be waited for and expected, if this life shall reach an autumn ripening. It was at the summer solstice, when the days were longest and the nights at their minimum, that a child of light was born to Timothy and Mary King (Mason) Brooks: June 20, 1813. It was Sunday, moreover, and the sound of the church bells and of the carol of birds was in the air. If nature had a day in her calendar for that year, select and celestial, it should have been this; a day for a poet to be born; for even a "babe of paradise" not to feel astray or lonesome looking its first upon this warm, fair, leafy and flowering earth. The house now numbered seventy-seven in Bridge street, northern corner of Arabella street, was the birthplace of Charles Timothy Brooks. For fifteen years he remained under his father's roof, from the summer of 1813 to that of 1828, though the family home was not long in the Bridge street house. Among the earliest things we learn of him, outside the home, is that he was a pupil in the private school taught by his maternal aunt, Miss Abigail Mason, with whom in after years he long maintained a bright correspondence, she being then engaged in teaching in Virginia and looking to him for news from the New England home and friends. A little picture of him inserts itself here, since it must belong to about this time of his infant-school days. Though |