from a sister, was inscribed with his full name, Augustus L. Hillhouse, and gave the clue to his city residence and to his connections with his native country. His grave was made in the village where he died; and the whole population there followed his hearse with unaffected lamentations. It was afterwards ascertained that he had expressed a desire to be buried among his kindred in that natal soil which he had never ceased to love. Accordingly, on the 16th of June, just three months after the first burial, his remains, having been disinterred and conveyed across the ocean, were brought to the resting place which he had desired for them. It was late in a long summer afternoon, when a few friends assembled in the cemetery to witness the re-interment. Strangely did the past and the present seem to mingle in that hour,—the thought of the New Haven from which Augustus L. Hillhouse went away for the circuit of European travel in 1816, setting itself in contrast with the thought of the New Haven to which, after so long a time, his remains had been at last brought home. How much of the world's history was included in the interval! How unlike the America, the Europe, and the world of 1816, to the America, the Europe, and the world of 1859! A few gray men were gathered around that open grave, whom the westering sun and the lengthening shadows might remind that with them also the day was far spent. They remembered that when he who was now gathered to his fathers went from his home in all the blossoming promise of his youth, they, too, were young; and at the thought of what he was when they saw him last, they could not but recall the venerable image of his father, and the names and forms of all who sat around his father's table, and amid whose love his childhood grew. Of that household circle, there stood beside his grave one sole survivor; the names of all the rest were already carved on monumental marbles, there in the family burial place. A few words of devotion, of remembrance, and of consolation, were spoken, and the remains were left to mingle with kindred dust. The life of Augustus L. Hillhouse may seem not to have fulfilled its early promise. Yet he did not live in vain. While he had not ceased to be a young man, he said, "I feel a real need of deserving the gratitude of my fellow men. I should esteem the labor of my life well employed if, according to the ancient superstition, I could prophesy at its close, and bequeath one useful truth as a legacy to mankind." Whether anything may hereafter be produced from the great mass of papers which he left like Sibylline leaves, is not known. But not to speak of his incidental connection with the evangelical renaissance at Geneva and among the French Protestants-the one hymn which he has given to the churches that worship in the English language, will be his imperishable memorial. Already that hymn is sung not only in the churches of New England, but in kindred churches wherever, westward, even to the "western hills of golden ore," a Christian civilization has taught the wilderness to know the voice of Christian song-nay, wherever the sons of those churches are renewing the labor of the Apostles, whether in the remotest isles, or in the shadow of hoary Lebanon, or where the Tigris rushes in his rocky channel among the graves of ancient empires. And if the prophetic word which he so long was hoping to utter, and the "one useful truth" unknown before, which it was his life-long labor to bequeath to mankind, should never be found, those who knew him and loved. him may remember that "In a Roman mouth the graceful name Of poet and of prophet was the same." |