Excerpt from Beecher as a Humorist: Selections From the Published Works of Henry Ward Beecher
Tms volume was practically completed just before the spirit which animates it, and which had brought uplift and comfort and knowledge and wholesome mirth to so many hearts, had been called home.
Then, for a time, the thought of giving to the world these laughter-provoking extracts seemed almost like a sacrilege. But soon a more healthful feeling prevailed. Why should the song cease be cause the singer was gone? Why should the help that comes from laughter be ended because the mirth-making spirit had departed?
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Henry Ward Beecher was an American preacher and reformer, born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Reared in a Puritan atmosphere, he has graphically described the mystical experience which, coming to him in his early youth, changed his whole conception of theology and determined his choice of the ministry.
It was in the pulpit that Beecher was seen at his best. His mastery of the English tongue, his dramatic power, his instinctive art of impersonation, which had become a second nature, his vivid imagination, his breadth of intellectual view, his quaint humor alternating with genuine pathos, and above all his simple and singularly unaffected devotional nature, made him as a preacher without a peer in his own time and country.
He was stricken with apoplexy while still active in the ministry, and died at Brooklyn on the 8th of March 1887, in the seventy-fourth year of his age.
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