the spirit of the poem, with its babbling brook hidden away in the recesses of deep forest shade. The poet's own testimony places this poem, which established his fame, in a period earlier than his college days, when he was at his home in Cummington, among the Berkshire Hills, yet just without the county.
Hawthorne must have been in Berkshire before coming to Lenox in 1850, for his "American Note Book" contains a description of a Williams Commencement in 1838. He journeyed by stage from Pittsfield to Williamstown and North Adams. As he approached the college town, pointing to Greylock, he asked the driver, "What hill is that?" Hawthorne was evidently less impressed with the grand dignity of Greylock than Thoreau, who thought the influence on the college from such a mountain neighbor "as good at least as one well-endowed professorship."
Not forgetting Williams as the birthplace of American foreign missions, as the first college in America to have an astronomical observatory, to introduce gymnasium apparatus, to form an alumni association, there is yet another feature of her history which naturally invites mention here, the personality and life work of Mark Hopkins. These grand old hills have produced no nobler type of man than he. Born in Stockbridge in 1802, he came over the hills to college in early life. Here, where he passed his student days, destiny speedily marked out his life work too. And what a life work! It covers a period of over threescore years, for thirty-six years of which he was president of the college, which he re-created. There is a grandeur in the mere physical endurance this long connection suggests, like the grandeur of "the everlasting hills." Men of science tell us the mountains feed, nay build, the plain. Mark Hopkins was a builder, and the product of his building was character; and the evidences of his work, though apparently near at hand, are yet to be found far away from Berkshire in the mental framework of his many pupils in all lands. He put upon them the "ear mark" of no system; he wished of them no master's image. He called them unto liberty, to the possession of their own best selves, to life. Was it not most fitting that he should be called to the presidency of the American Board for Foreign Missions, which took its origin in Berkshire some fifty years before, almost within a stone's throw of his own home and his final resting place? "The Outline Study of Man," "The Law of Love," "The Evidences of Christianity," will long have place among his best writings. His Memoir has been written by Dr. Franklin Carter, now president of the college. The Hopkins Memorial Building, recently completed, stands a monument to him whose name it bears. It is a monument also of him under whose administrative ability the college continues to flourish. There is a scholarly monoraph on "Mark Hopkins, Teacher," by Prof. Leverett W. Spring.
Stockbridge and Williamstown have ever been closely associated. They stand in fraternal relation like an older and younger brother. Of the many socialties which unite them, perhaps those of the Hopkins and Field families are the most intimate. "Cherry Cottage" was the birthplace of Dr. Hopkins. It stands just out of Stockbridge, on the road to Great Barrington. Near the same road a mother once found her child, —a tiny truant scarcely able to run alone,— away off in the fields "looking at the great treeses." Years passed. This Stockbridge child, grown to manhood, founded at Williams College the earliest college astronomical observatory in the land. Prof. Albert Hopkins was not a literary man, strictly; he was rather a scientist; but, because of his happy and poetic trend of mind, probably no man in Berkshire has exerted a wider influence in fostering the literary spirit in others.
For almost a century the name of Field seems to color the very air of Stockbridge. It pervades Prospect Hill; it rings from the chime of bells; it associates itself with Laurel Hill; it lurks in the unspotted neatness of the village. The elder Field, who came to Stockbridge from Haddam Conn., in the year 1819, was a pastor of the sturdy old New England type. Throughout his long service here, whether he preached "at the little red school—
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