I am very desirous that you should be duly established at Yale, and have no doubt you will satisfy the college and fill the place with comfort and credit.
We will talk over matters at odd moments when you come.
I shall be most glad to help you as a friend and fellow-worker; but I cannot promise any special instruction, and shall take no fee. “Dog does not eat dog,” is the saying, you know.
Judge Lowell writes, in 1888, “I was in college when Dr. Gray was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and ours was, I think, the first or one of the first classes to whom he lectured. I remember his lectures well, they were so full of knowledge and of enthusiasm and so calculated to impress the young mind.
“I suppose he had not lectured much of late years; and in his many other successes, his powers as a lecturer may have been overlooked by those who have written of him.”
Dr. Rothrock, in his address before the memorial meeting of the botanical section of the Academy at Philadelphia, speaks of Dr. Gray’s patient drilling of him in writing his thesis, making him go over and over it again, until it had been rewritten six times before he allowed him to be satisfied with it. His pupils would always remember his comment when satisfied,—“That is neatly stated.”
And Dr. Farlow shows the picturesque figure “hurrying down Garden Street (on lecture mornings) so covered by the mass of branches and flowers which were to illustrate the lecture that his head and body were hardly visible.”[39]
“The few who gathered around the little table in Harvard Hall, in pursuit of knowledge which did not count in the college reckoning, will never forget the untiring patience with which he explained what then seemed difficult, the contagious enthusiasm with which he led them on from simple facts toward the higher fields of science, or the tender personal interest which he showed in their hopes and half-formed plans for the future; an interest which, on his part, only strengthened as years passed on, and makes them now mourn, not so much the death of a great botanist as the loss of a sympathizing friend.”[40]
TO W. J. HOOKER.
April 30, 1858.