"His heart was large. Great objects alone could fill it; and it was full of great objects. There was no littleness of thought, or purpose, or ambition, in him—nothing little. The range of his literary sympathies was as wide as the world of mind; his benevolence as universal as the wants of man.
"His person was commanding. Gentle in his manners, affable, courteous, he yet, unconsciously, partly by the natural dignity of his figure, and still more by the greatness visibly impressed on his features, exacted from us all a deference, a veneration even, that seemed as natural as it was inevitable. His very presence was a restraint upon everything like levity or frivolity, and diffused a thoughtful and composed, if not always grave, air about him, which, never ceasing to be cheerful and bright, never failed to dignify the objects of pursuit and elevate the intercourse of life. A gentleman in the primitive sense of the word, he was, without seeking to be thought so, always felt to be of a superior order of men.
"On the whole, it has been my fortune to know no man whose entire character has appeared to me so near perfection, none, whom it would so satisfy me in all things to resemble.
"How much we lost in him it is now impossible to estimate, and it would, perhaps, be useless to know. His early death extinguished great hopes. But his memory is a treasure, which even death cannot take from us."
Hon. Rufus Choate writes thus: "It happened that my whole time at college coincided with the period of President Brown's administration. He was inducted into office in the autumn of 1815, my Freshman year, and he died in the summer of 1820. It is not the want, therefore, but the throng, of recollections of him that creates any difficulty in complying with your request. He was still young at the time of his inauguration—not more than thirty-one—and he had passed those few years, after having been for three of them a tutor in Dartmouth College, in the care of a parish in North Yarmouth, in Maine; but he had already, in an extraordinary degree, dignity of person and sentiment; rare beauty,—almost youthful beauty, of countenance; a sweet, deep, commanding tone of voice; a grave but graceful and attractive demeanor—all the traits and all the qualities, completely ripe, which make up and express weight of character; and all the address and firmness and knowledge of youth, men, and affairs which constitute what we call administrative talent. For that form of talent, and for the greatness which belongs to character, he was doubtless remarkable. He must have been distinguished for this among the eminent. From his first appearance before the students on the day of his inauguration, when he delivered a brief and grave address in Latin, prepared we were told, the evening before, until they followed the bier, mourning, to his untimely grave, he governed them perfectly and always, through their love and veneration; the love and veneration of the 'willing soul.' Other arts of government were, indeed, just then, scarcely practicable. The college was in a crisis which relaxed discipline, and would have placed a weak instructor, or an instructor unbeloved, or loved with no more than ordinary regard, in the power of classes which would have abused it. It was a crisis which demanded a great man for President, and it found such an one in him. In 1816, the Legislature of New Hampshire passed the acts which changed the Charter of the institution, abolished the old corporation of Trustees, created a new one, extinguished the legal identity of the college, and reconstructed it or set up another under a different and more ambitious name and a different government. The old Trustees, with President Brown at their head, denied the validity of these acts, and resisted their administration. A dominant political party had passed or adopted them; and thereupon a controversy arose between the college and a majority of the State; conducted in part in the courts of law of New Hampshire, and of the Union; in part by the press; sometimes by the students of the old institution and the new in personal collision, or the menace of personal collision, within the very gardens of the academy; which was not terminated until the Supreme Court of the United States adjudged the acts unconstitutional and void. This decision was pronounced in 1819; and then, and not till then, had President Brown peace,—a brief peace made happy by letters, by religion, by the consciousness of a great duty performed for law, for literature, and for the Constitution,—happy even in prospect of premature death. This contest tried him and the college with extreme and various severity. To induce students to remain in a school disturbed and menaced; to engage and inform public sentiment, the true patron and effective founder, by showing forth that the principles of a sound political morality, as well as of law, prescribed the action of the old Trustees; to confer with the counsel of the college, two of whom—Mr. Mason and Mr. Webster—have often declared to me their admiration of the intellectual force and practical good sense which he brought to those conferences,—this all, while it withdrew him somewhat from the proper studies and proper cares of his office, created a necessity for the display of the very rarest qualities of temper, discretion, tact, and command, and he met it with consummate ability and fortune. One of his addresses to the students in the chapel at the darkest moment of the struggle, presenting the condition and prospects of the college, and the embarrassments of all kinds which surrounded its instructors, and appealing to the manliness and affection and good principles of the students to help 'by whatsoever things were honest, lovely, or of good report,' occurs to recollection as of extraordinary persuasiveness and influence.
"There can be no doubt that he had very eminent intellectual ability, true love of the beautiful in all things, and a taste trained to discover, enjoy, and judge it, and that his acquirements were competent and increasing. It was the 'keenness' of his mind of which Mr. Mason always spoke to me as remarkable in any man of any profession. He met him only in consultation as a client; but others, students, all nearer his age, and admitted to his fuller intimacy, must have been struck rather with the sobriety and soundness of his thoughts, the solidity and large grasp of his understanding, and the harmonized culture of all its parts. He wrote a pure and clear English style, and he judged of elegant literature with a catholic and appreciative but chastised taste. The recollections of a student of the learning of a beloved and venerated president of a college, whom he sees only as a boy sees a man, and his testimony concerning it, will have little value; but I know that he was esteemed an excellent Greek and Latin scholar, and our recitations of Horace, which the poverty of the college and the small number of its teachers induced him to superintend, though we were Sophomores only, were the most agreeable and instructive exercises of the whole college classical course.
"Of studies more professional he seemed master. Locke, Stewart, with whose liberality and tolerance and hopeful and rational philanthropy he sympathized warmly, Butler, Edwards, and the writers on natural law and moral philosophy, he expounded with the ease and freedom of one habitually trained and wholly equal to these larger meditations.
"His term of office was short and troubled; but the historian of the college will record of his administration a two-fold honor; first, that it was marked by a noble vindication of its chartered rights; and second, that it was marked also by a real advancement of its learning; by collections of ampler libraries, and by displays of a riper scholarship."