Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/72

 64 INTR on UC TION

" Craigie House " (from which the present Craigie street derived its name), better known now as "Washington's Headquarters " and " Longfellow's Home," where Madam Craigie herself, originally the daughter of a poor country clergyman, dispensed a generous hospitality to such stu- dents as won her favor. She was a lady of strong character and masculine intelligence, imbued with the free-thinking opinions so rife during and after the Rev- olutionary period, from which Franklin, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and other leading spirits, were by no means exempt. I have never doubted that Madam Craigie's influence contributed not a little to encourage in Randall's mind that marked tendency to independence of traditional beliefs which is so evident in most of his poems, especially the "Ode to God" and "The Philosopher in Search of a Religion."

Dr. Randall the elder was a stanch Unitarian, and had his pew in the once well known but now long vanished edifice of " Church Green," where the Rev. Dr. Alexander Young, eminent otherwise for his " Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, from 1623 to 1636," preached conservatively and drowsily for many years. Here the son heard nothing but authentic exposi- tion of Unitarianism in its early form, safe and highly re- spectable in the Boston of that day ; and one of his own childish ambitions, persistent even into his college life, was, as he himself told me, to become a minister of the Unitarian faith. This vision of a religious ministry, and not by any means his father's ministrations in the sick- room, was what fired his young soul, as he peered into the mysterious future ; and nothing cooled it but the contrast which forced itself on his quick perceptions between the ministry as a comfortable modern profession, a life of

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