Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/62

 54 INTRODUCTION

him. He criticised hardly men that stood deservedly high in the community, and almost all measures of government ; and in his harangues he was certainly sometimes tedious. If your memory is good, you will recollect instances of this kind at some of the last of the Class Meetings that he attended. I was glad when I did not sit at table next to him, because I had heard the same before. This phase of his character, however, did not long continue, and dur- ing the last years of his life, I am happy to say, it almost entirely disappeared. For the last three years there was a marked change in him. No harshness of criticism was ever heard. He was social, pleasant, subdued in his manner, and interesting in conversation.

"And now I will try to say something of Randall which is more to the purpose of what I have in view than any- thing which goes before. I am afraid you have become tired in trying to read thus far, and that you feel your time wasted. Dr. Randall was a very talented man. His read- ing in certain directions was very extensive. I always found, in spite of his eccentricities, his conversation inter- esting. He was a very learned man, and in natural science distinguished, as you know very well. Had he been allowed by his father to follow his inclination, I have little doubt he would have been a distinguished man — distin- guished as a scientist, a more useful and happier man. His father was determined he should adopt medicine as a profession. The son might have enjoyed it as a study, but the practice of it as a pursuit would have been abhor- rent. Our classmate was a s^ood man. If not much of a believer in the Christian Dispensation, he was vastly better than many, I perhaps may say than most, of those who arc. He was a firm believer in God, a God of love. His love was unbounded. The volume of verse that he

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