Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/23

Rh —as for generations it has been—one of the prime guarantees of the permanence of democracy in America. Few places in this land have produced a proportionately greater number of distinguished people than has Northampton. Social advantages were thus added to those of birth, and to all these in turn the advantages of dwelling in a region of great natural beauty.

It was in William Whitney's early infancy that his father moved into a dwelling built on the precise site of the Jonathan Edwards house. This dwelling was the second in a row of six neighboring houses, all of which could boast of more or less notable occupants. In the first lived Dr. Seeger, who was educated at the same school and time as Schiller, at "the Solitude." Beyond the Whitneys' was the house in which lived Lewis S. Hopkins, the father of Edward W. Hopkins, the Sanskrit scholar of Bryn Mawr. The fourth was the original homestead of the Timothy Dwights, in which the first Yale President of that name, and Theodore, the Secretary of the Hartford Convention and founder of the New York "Daily Advertiser," were born, both grandsons of Jonathan Edwards. The adjoining place was the home of the elder Sylvester Judd, and of his son Sylvester, the author of "Margaret;" and the sixth house was occupied by the Italian political exile, Gherardi, and later by Dr. William Allen, ex-President of Bowdoin College.

Whitney was a mere boy of fifteen when he entered Williams College as a sophomore. Three years later (in 1845) he had easily outstripped all his classmates and graduated with the highest honors; and with all