Oct 17, 2026 · 2 hr 18 min · 39 segments
"Phillips Brooks-Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe" explores the profound contributions of Phillips Brooks, a prominent figure in American religious thought, and his relationship with the influential writer…
The man whose life is the theme of this small volume had opinions of his own about the reading and the writing of biographies.
An address to the boys of Phillips Academy Exeter, delivered in 1886, showed beyond question that the whole subject of biography was familiar and dear to him.
On this occasion he used a few words which cannot be ignored by anyone who would attempt to describe his life.
I think, he said, that the reading of many biographies ought to be begun in the middle.
It seems a disorderly suggestion, but it has reason in it.
It is the way in which you come to know a man.
You touch his life at some point in its course.
You find it full of attractive activity.
You grow interested in what he is doing.
So you grow interested in him.
And then, not till then, you care to know how he came to be what you find him, what his training was, what his youth was, who his parents were, perhaps who his ancestors were, and who was the first man of his name who came over to America, and where that progenitor's other descendants have settled.
The same is true, I think, of a biography.
Indeed, I have often wondered whether a biography might not be written in that way.
Probably biographers will not so write for us, but we may sometimes read thus the biographies which they have written in the dull order of chronology, and find them full of livier and deeper interest.
If within the limits of the present writing it is not possible to act upon the whole suggestion of this passage, at least we need not utterly disregard it.
Let us then look at two events of the year 1865.
When the news of the fall of Richmond reached Philadelphia, a meeting for public rejoicing was immediately held in front of the building from which, eighty-nine years before, the Declaration of Independence had been given forth.
To offer up thanksgiving for the ending of the Civil War, a man not yet thirty years of age, slender, extraordinarily tall, and of a countenance the more beautiful for its great earnestness, stood up with his eyes toward the sky and thanked God from the very heart of the whole assemblage gathered outside of Independence Hall.
One person was there, however, who had no rightful place in the crowd, for he turned to the man beside him and said, Look at that old fogey yonder, praying with his eyes turned up, as if God was any more up than down.
Who are you calling an old fogey? replied his neighbor, who happened to know the young preacher so grossly misdefined.
Take that! So saying and acting with less of Christian forbearance than of singular appropriateness to the prayer just then making for the overthrow of our enemies, he dealt the fellow a stinging blow.
It was an answer which, in spite of its vigor, lacked the important virtue of telling who the old fogey was.
This was in April of 1865.
Lowell's ode for the occasion seems permanently to have fixed the memory of it, not as a local and special celebration, but as something national and universal.
The man whose life is the theme of this small volume had opinions of his own about the reading and the writing of biographies.
An address to the boys of Phillips Academy Exeter, delivered in 1886, showed beyond question that the whole subject of biography was familiar and dear to him.
On this occasion he used a few words which cannot be ignored by anyone who would attempt to describe his life.
I think, he said, that the reading of many biographies ought to be begun in the middle.
It seems a disorderly suggestion, but it has reason in it.
It is the way in which you come to know a man.
You touch his life at some point in its course.
You find it full of attractive activity.
You grow interested in what he is doing.
So you grow interested in him.
And then, not till then, you care to know how he came to be what you find him, what his training was, what his youth was, who his parents were, perhaps who his ancestors were, and who was the first man of his name who came over to America, and where that progenitor's other descendants have settled.
The same is true, I think, of a biography.
Indeed, I have often wondered whether a biography might not be written in that way.
Probably biographers will not so write for us, but we may sometimes read thus the biographies which they have written in the dull order of chronology, and find them full of livier and deeper interest.
If within the limits of the present writing it is not possible to act upon the whole suggestion of this passage, at least we need not utterly disregard it.
Let us then look at two events of the year 1865.
When the news of the fall of Richmond reached Philadelphia, a meeting for public rejoicing was immediately held in front of the building from which, eighty-nine years before, the Declaration of Independence had been given forth.
To offer up thanksgiving for the ending of the Civil War, a man not yet thirty years of age, slender, extraordinarily tall, and of a countenance the more beautiful for its great earnestness, stood up with his eyes toward the sky and thanked God from the very heart of the whole assemblage gathered outside of Independence Hall.
One person was there, however, who had no rightful place in the crowd, for he turned to the man beside him and said, Look at that old fogey yonder, praying with his eyes turned up, as if God was any more up than down.
Who are you calling an old fogey? replied his neighbor, who happened to know the young preacher so grossly misdefined.
Take that! So saying and acting with less of Christian forbearance than of singular appropriateness to the prayer just then making for the overthrow of our enemies, he dealt the fellow a stinging blow.
It was an answer which, in spite of its vigor, lacked the important virtue of telling who the old fogey was.
This was in April of 1865.
Lowell's ode for the occasion seems permanently to have fixed the memory of it, not as a local and special celebration, but as something national and universal.
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