Tributes Of Loving Memory To Elnathan Elisha Higbee PDF Download

Excerpt from Tributes of Loving Memory to Elnathan Elisha Higbee, for Nearly Nine Years State Superintendent of Public Instruction of Pennsylvania: With Biographical Sketch and Selections From His Writings in Prose and Verse Elnathan Elisha Higbee, D. D., LL. D., late State Superintendent of Public Instruction of Pennsylvania, was born at St. George, near Burlington, Vermont, March 27, 1830. He was the youngest member of the family which consisted of ten children, eight sons and two daughters. His parents were Lewis Higbee and Sarah Baker. His mother came from a noble stock, was a woman of surpassing loveliness of disposition and character, gentle and amiable to a fault, if this may ever be said of qualities so admirable. She had the rare gift of holding easily her rightful supremacy in her houseful of boys by the persuasiveness of the quiet and gentle dignity of manner which was her settled habit, and she so commended herself to the love and devotion of her children that she was ever afterwards the object of their sincerest veneration. The subject of this sketch frequently referred to her in terms of the tenderest affection, extolling her many virtues and traits of excellence that constitute the chief glory of womanhood and motherhood. It was through her that he used to take a passing pride in tracing his relationship with Ethan Allen, the hero of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. His father was a fair representative of the sturdy New England type of manhood, possessed of great natural strength of character and forceful mental endowments, with keen powers of penetration into the springs of action and motives of men, a fearless upholder of the right of which he had an intuitive sense and for which he would stand up to the last. His was a rugged character of the earlier days, and yet he was not without a becoming appreciation of the amenities of life. He was fond of good literature, especially of the forensic style, and used to take great pleasure in reproducing portions of the speeches he had heard and read, which he did with more than ordinary dramatic effect. He also had a rich vein of humor which was ever flashing into forms of quickwitted speech. He was withal of an impulsive, generous disposition, that showed itself in many an act of disinterested kindness. He was not without honor among his own people, for they elected him to represent them in the Legislature of the State, where he vigorously defended the agricultural interests of his constituents and the entire Commonwealth against the unjust measures of burdensome taxation and repression with which they were then threatened. On one occasion, when this subject was under consideration, he broke out as follows: "There are, Mr. Chairman, some members of this body who seem to think that farmers are horses, and lawyers knights born with spurs on their heels, and commissioned by the powers above to ride the farmers to death." A man that could make that sentence, we may well believe, could make a vigorous and telling speech. Thus much of the father - and we wish it might be more - seems to be appropriately introduced here as throwing light upon the noble qualities of mind and heart which distinguished, in so marked a degree, his last-born son, in whom these and other inherited endowments blossomed into such glorious fruition under the genial influence of the educational advantages he enjoyed and the ever-broadening culture that comes from patient, painstaking, reverent study. Of his earliest years but little is known. When he was eight years of age the old homestead was burned to the ground during the night. Elnathan was tossed from an upstairs window of the burning building upon a feather-bed below. This dreadful experience left an abiding impression upon him, for he frequently referred to it in afterlife, and no doubt a great change was thus suddenly and rudely wrought in the settled home-life of the family. Just when his formal education began.