Daniel Oliver, whose name appears on the list of teachers of past years in both the Medical and Academical departments of Dartmouth College, was born on the 9th of September, 1787. He was the third son of the Rev. Thomas Fitch Oliver, at that time rector of St. Michael's, Marblehead, and belonged to a family distinguished in the history of Massachusetts from the earliest period of the colony. He was a direct descendant of Mr. Thomas Oliver, whom Winthrop calls "an experienced and very skilful surgeon," and who acted as one of the ruling elders of the church in Boston soon after his arrival in 1632. Through his mother he was descended from William Pynchon, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Colony, and the Rev. William Hubbard, the historian of New England; and, through his paternal grandmother he was a descendant of the Rev. John Eliot, the noted Indian missionary.
After the death of his father, which took place at Garrison Forest, near Baltimore, before he had attained his tenth year, he was placed in the care of Colonel Lloyd Rogers, of that city, and almost immediately commenced his preparatory course for college, applying himself to his studies with great diligence, and entered. Harvard College in 1802. Although fond of study, and possessed of a mind of unusual vigor and brilliancy, the ambitions of college life do not seem to have dimmed the memories of his forest home in the South, and in his letters, while at Cambridge, he more than once recalls the pleasant hours when living within its shades, in a strain at once suggestive of a refined and poetic nature.
To one of his thoughtful and contemplative mind it is not strange that, suddenly transferred from the quiet of home life to the turmoil of college scenes, he should have found much that was distasteful; and the following extract from a letter to him from the late Mr. Justice Story, at that time betrothed to his eldest sister, and with whom he was on terms of intimacy, would seem to imply no little disquietude on the part of his student friend during the earlier years of his life at Cambridge.
"You can hardly imagine with what delight I recur to the days which I spent at Cambridge. In the delightful seclusion from noisy vulgarity, in the sweet interchange of kind sentiments, and in the mutual competition of classic pursuits, I possessed a unity and tranquillity of purpose far beyond the merits of my later years. My first years there were not marked with this peculiar character. It was in my Junior and Senior years that, from forming a choice of friends, and participating in the higher views of literature, I felt that happiness resulted in the activity of intellect and possession of friendship. That period will in future be yours; and though you may start with surprise at the thought at this moment, that period will be marked out in the calendar of your years as among the dies fortunatos. You and I are not widely distinct in years, and you can therefore readily believe that this attachment is not the moral relation of comparison and experience; no, it was reality which charmed me when present, and reflects a lustre in remembrance. Go on, then, my dear fellow, in the academic course with awakened hope. A high destiny awaits you. The joys of youth shall give spirit to the exertions of manhood, and the pursuits of literature yield a permanent felicity attainable only by the votaries of taste. Sweet are the attainments which accomplish the wishes of friends. Our reliance upon you is founded on a belief that ambition and literature will unite us in as close bonds as sympathy and affinity.
"On a subject so interesting to me as my collegiate course I seldom reflect without melancholy; not a harsh and dark brooding, but a soft and tender pensiveness which
"'Sheds o'er the soul a sympathetic gloom.'
"The thousand associations of festivity, pleasantry, study, and recreation live to hallow the whole. The picture, by its distance, loses its defects, and retains only the strong colorings of primitive impression. Never do I cast my eyes on that dear seat of letters but I exclaim involuntarily with Gray:
"'Ah! happy fields, ah! pleasing shade,
Ah! groves beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain;
I feel the gales that round ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow.'
"By the way, when you are at leisure and feel a little dull, I advise you to take up some of our good-natured writers, such as Dr. Moore, Goldsmith, Coleman, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Smollett's novels, or the pleasant and airy productions of the muse. These I have always found a powerful anti-splenetic; and, although I am not a professed physician, I will venture to prescribe to you in this instance with all the confidence of Hippocrates. The whole system of nostrums from that arch-quack, the old serpent, down to the far-famed Stoughton of our own day, does not present so powerful a remedy, amid all its antis, as cheerful reading to a heavy spirit. I will venture to say, in the spirit of Montesquieu, that an hour of such reading will place one quietly in his elbow chair in all the tranquillity of a Platonic lover."
It is probable that Mr. Story's influence was not without its effect in reconciling his young friend to college life, for he was very soon to be found among the foremost in the race for honorable distinction. He was graduated with distinguished honor, in 1806, in a class of remarkable ability, among whom were the late Hon. Alexander Everett, Judge William P. Preble, Professor J. G. Cogswell, and the venerable Dr. Jacob Bigelow, its last surviving member.