Researching Edward Payson

Edward Payson graduated from Harvard College in 1803, was then principal of a school at Portland, Maine, and in 1807 became junior pastor of the Congregational Church at Portland, where he remained, after 1811, as senior pastor, until his death on October 22, 1827. Archibald Alexander suggested in 1844 that "no man in our country has left behind him a higher character for eminent piety than the Rev. Edward Payson."

The most complete collection of his sermons, with a memoir by Asa Cummings originally published in 1828, is the Memoir, Select Thoughts and Sermons of the late Rev. Edward Payson (3 vols., Portland, 1846; Philadelphia, 1859). Based on this is the volume, Mementos of Edward Payson (New York, 1873), by the Rev. E. L. Janes of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

In his youth he was an opera singer, from 1882 a piano maker, and from 1906 president of a piano manufacturing company.

He began learning Esperanto in 1910, and his translations began appearing in 1919.Between the years 1918-1921 he worked as president of the "Esperanto-Asocio de Norda Ameriko" and after was proclaimed honorary president of that organization.

When he was eighty-seven years old, he wrote an Esperanto novel set in Venice, Juneco kaj Amo (Youth and Love).

His other original writing La fantoma edzino (The Phantom Wife) is a sentimental tale of a man who yearns for his deceased wife so much, that she seems to return.

His translations from English include some works of Mabel Wagnalls, and a novel by Henry Rider Haggard.

He lived in Lexington, Massachusetts for many years at the end of his life, and died there in 1932. (He enjoyed keeping blooded horses, and had a large farm in Lexington with about twenty of them.)