and sensibility, he made a most favorable impression. Dr. Isaac Watts, who wrote even more letters than hymns, met him at Mrs. Holden’s house early in May, 1741, and subsequently opined that her “disposition” towards him was such that he could have virtually anything he asked for. In the upshot he secured a donation of £400 “to build a Chapple for the Use of ye College” at Cambridge. The news was greeted “with much approbation.”[1] He probably brought the actual cash with him on his return to America; for on the first day of December, 1741, he landed “at Cape Cod,” and on the 14th the Corporation passed a formal vote of thanks to the donor, and another to him “for his good offices in proposing to Mrs. Holden this appropriation of her bounty to Harvard College.”
As soon as the winter was over, the erection of the building was actively taken in hand. Young Edward Augustus Holyoke of the class of 1746 was then just entering college, and with all of a boy’s interest in building operations he records in his diary the successive stages of the work:
- ↑ Letters of Isaac Watts to Dr. Coleman of Boston, in Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 2d Series, ix, 380 ſſ. Coleman published a funeral sermon on Holden, including pious extracts from the latter’s correspondence. Mrs. Holden and her daughters “much disapproved” of thus having his “private religious sentiments made public in an age wherein religion, is not very modish,” and actually suppressed a London reprint.
