INTRODUCTION.

A BIOGRAPHY of Bishop Doane needs little in the way of elaborate introduction. The title-page alone is sufficient to commend it to the favourable attention of a public, which, however divided in sentiment it may have been as to the religious and ecclesiastical merits of a distinguished prelate, has always shown itself ready to appreciate his benevolence and public spirit, to admire his brilliant talents, to sympathize with his extraordinary trials, and to give his name a high place among those which are to be handed down to posterity as honourable representatives of the times in which we live. Believing this to be the case, it is with unfeigned diffidence and reluctance, that, in compliance with the friendly urgency of a beloved brother in Christ, the author of these Memoirs, I have undertaken to say something by way of preface to his labour of love. The Life itself is vastly more interesting than any thing that can be written to commend it. It is the more incumbent, therefore, in the few words that flow naturally from the pen, to aim at brevity rather than at any merit proportioned to the dignity of the subject.

It was about twelve years ago, that a casual remark of one of the noblest and truest of Christian men, the late Rev. Martin P. Parks, first opened the mind of the present writer to a knowledge of one of the grand traits of Bishop Doane's character. Dr. Parks had been on a visit to Riverside; had spent several days

there in that cluster of busy hives-the Episcopal residence, the Hall, the College, the Parish Schools, the Church; returned full of enthusiasm from his visit, and, urging a brother clergyman to go and see what he had seen, added the following inducement: "You will meet," says he, "a man, who does habitually the work of three or four men, and yet is as light and gay under it, as if he had nothing at all to do." This was quite new to me at that time. My acquaintance with the Bishop had been but slight, and casual; extending hardly beyond a knowledge of some of his literary efforts: those sparks thrown off from the rapid movement of his mind, the articles in prose or verse, that appeared occasionally under his signature in one or other of the papers. These admirable little gems, which are collected in the present volume, I had taken as an index of the whole man, rather than, as they are, an index of the mere exuberance of an extraordinarily warm heart, and fervid imagination. It is true, that wherever a real worker exists, there is a spring of lively poetic feeling, somewhere near the spring of action, which occasionally wells up in spite of all efforts to repress it. But in this country, generally, earnest workers are apt to be grave workers. The weight of responsibility is laid upon our shoulders at so early a period, and the wear and tear of life is so continuously going on, that men in serious employments are liable to have their cares written upon their faces; or, if in any case it chances to be otherwise, something of the sort is at least expected of them. We have a great dread of "fancy men: but, in a wholesome dread of "fancy," we are apt to separate the poetic temperament from the working temperament, to conceive of strength and beauty as mutually antagonistic, to attribute grace and buoyancy to mere want of solidity and strength. It is no discredit to Bishop Doane's memory, though doubtless it was a source of no little inconvenience to him in life, that he was peculiarly liable to misapprehension on this score. He was a Bishop, and a Poet: two characters, wide as the poles asunder in popular imagination, and both of them frequently misunderstood by contemporaneous judgment. It may be said, that

he was naturally a Bishop and a Poet; intensely both. Whatever prejudices exist against either of those characters he had to bear in their full brunt. Those who were drawn toward the Bishop found the way to him entangled with poetic "extravagances "-as they deemed them: those who would have admired the Poet found the mitre and the crook staring them in the face. It was only on more intimate acquaintance, to those who saw him at Riverside, in the centre of his innumerable and fruitful labours, that the seeming antagonism was fully reconciled; and it was seen, that for his two great vocations, feeding the sheep of Christ and feeding His lambs, the peculiar heartfulness of the Bishop, his playful and ready fancy, his buoyancy of spirits, his promptness to see good in everything and in everybody, his versatility of mind, and variety of accomplishments, and, pervading all this, his tremendous power of work, strong will, and indomitable perseverance, were not in the slightest degree redundant or superfluous, but were all needed for the burden which divine Providence had given him to bear.

It has been the writer's privilege, without any more intimate connection with the subject of these memoirs than would naturally arise from sympathy with his work and respect for his character, to have had many opportunities of observing him in that genial centre of his labours and home pleasures. The reader will pardon a reminiscence, which, trivial as it seems, may serve perhaps better than more elaborate description, to give an idea of the spirit that reigned there. The scene is Riverside: the time, the first morning of a visit to that place. To this the reader may add, in imagination, a late arrival the night before; an unceremonious reception; an evening elongated into morning-as was usual in a house which seemed never to go to bed; a short interval of repose; and an awakening before sunrise: the prayer-bell of St. Mary's and innumerable singing birds having conspired to murder sleep. It is a dewy spring morning. Neither the bell nor the birds are disposed to be quiet yet awhile. We make a virtue therefore of necessity, and start out of the house for an early glance at its surroundings. The

door is barely reached, when the Bishop, pen in hand, and in full working gear of study-gown and slippers, sallies out from the library, and joins us in our excursion. He has evidently just risen from work, but as cheery and full of spirits as if hearing the birds sing were the sole business of his life. He does not linger long, however, in the open air. With a pleasant word or two, and with an appreciative glance at river, trees, and sky, he plunges into the library again, from which about breakfast-time he emerges with a bundle of letters and other papers, that show plainly enough how the time has been spent there. In this simple outline the reader has the germ of a day at Riverside. He has the secret of that wonderful amount of leisure that the Bishop had always at his disposal, for friends, for casual droppers-in, for social calls, for parochial visits, for church-going to an extent quite unparalleled among men of active habits; for a life, in short, divided and subdivided into so many engagements, that it seemed impossible for any man to do justice to them all. But it was only his time that was thus divided and subdivided. The man himself was a unit, never divided or distracted. Whatever he did, whether for a moment, or for an hour, he did it wholly, with full attention and full might. For many years past it has been a matter of constantly recurring amusement to the large dinner parties gathered around the Bishop during the short interval between the morning and evening sessions of Convention, to be suddenly aroused to a sense of the lapse of time by seeing his chair at table vacant. Whenever this appeared, no one was at a loss to know where to meet him. Repairing to the church, as rapidly as possible, the company always found him there, in full robes, seated in his place, and with the Convention organized, however few might be present, and going on with business. This promptness, and close attention to each matter in its time and place, marked all the Bishop did. The same spirit pervaded the whole of life at Riverside. A visit there always recalled the meaning of those old salutations "The Church in thy House "-for Riverside was eminently a church in a house. To spend a week there was a moral and spiritual tonic.

One left the place with renewed faith and hope of the good time coming, when the kingdom of God and His righteousness shall be more an object of daily care, and of more engrossing interest, than the now absorbing business of the mart or the exchange.

These things were most striking, when the home at Riverside was all sunshine; when, to add a charm to cheerful and wellordered industry, the unceasing labour of love, there was the inspiring presence of one now but recently departed to her rest, whose childlike simplicity of character, buoyancy of spirits, unbounded benevolence, and uncalculating self-devotion, made her a fit companion for Bishop Doane. It pleased God to bring a shadow over the house, by which half of its light was eclipsed. Mrs. Doane, a prey to a malady, which required constant travel to alleviate her sufferings, was obliged to leave the home she had so long graced, and finally received the tidings of her husband's death, and not long after her own summons to meet him, in a foreign land. In connection with this subject it deserves to be recorded, though it touches on sacred ground, that in the latter years of his life one of the few things that annoyed the Bishop, and about which he seemed a little unreasonable, was the custom in Church papers of printing "Episcopal Acts" in small type. And why? The reason of his annoyance once partially escaped him in his remonstrances with an editor: it was because the paper went abroad: namely, it came under the eyes of one, to whom that little paragraph, "Episcopal Acts of New Jersey," was the first and chief object of attraction. Trifles of this kind-if they can be called trifles-reveal glimpses of that element in the Bishop's character, which made him in his own family, and to those who knew him best, not an object of admiration only, but of the most tender and unwavering devotion. To return, however, to the subject of the opening of this paragraph: though Riverside suffered one great eclipse, and other shadows fell heavily upon it in the latter years of the Bishop's life, its brightness and cheerfulness suffered little apparent diminution. It had lost much that once enhanced, and seemed almost to constitute, its