Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by J. S. & C. ADAMS, in the

Clerk's Office in the District Court of Massachusetts.

PREFACE.

HAVING drawn up as condensed a Memoir of my lamented friend and former associate as I could, in justice to his talents and virtues, and made such selections from his sermons and other writings, as I thought would give the truest portrait of his intellect and his heart and be most acceptable to his numerous acquaintances, especially to the many hundreds of graduates who were blessed with his instructions in the class room, and heard his discourses in the College Chapel ; I now submit the volume to the candid judgment of an enlightened public. It is put forth, under the unavoidable disadvantages of lacking the revision and supervision of the author. Not one of the sermons which it contains, was ever printed till now, and not one of them, I presume, was considered by him, as prepared for the press. Had they come out in his lifetime and under his own critical eye, they might, in some respects, have received a finish, which posthumous editorship cannot give them.

But I will venture to say, that very few manuscripts, not revised and intended for publication, can be found among the papers of a deceased scholar of the highest reputation, needing less revision than those of Professor Fiske. In looking them carefully over, I have been surprised to find how few corrections, even of the most trifling nature, could be made, without injuring the

copy, as he left it. Some of his sermons are very much interlined, to be sure; and although ninety-nine out of a hundred readers would have said that the first draft needed no revision, it is obvious from a careful comparison of what is struck out with what is substituted, that nearly every correction is a real improvement. There is scarcely a collocation in the manuscript, which could be changed without impairing the strength or beauty of the sentence; and the most fastidious critic might almost be challenged to point out a single loose extemporaneous sentence in twenty pages. There are no superfluous words and no words are wanting.

I have said in the Memoir, that Professor Fiske, in the popular sense of the term, had but little imagination. I should not wonder, if some of his admirers were to differ from me on this point; and I must confess, that a more careful reading of his journal and discourses has led me to suspect, that I have not given him due credit in that particular. I still think, however, that his fancy lacked the wings which sometimes bear writers much inferior to him, above his range; but if by imagination is meant vividness of conception, and the power of presenting images vividly to other minds, Professor Fiske certainly was not deficient. I have inserted extracts from his voyage, in the Memoir, of extraordinary vivacity and beauty.

It may be thought by some, that his sermons, though admirable models of lucid arrangement and cogent reasoning, have too much of a metaphysical cast for common readers; and it cannot be denied, that they