Dr. Asa D. Smith writes thus:
"New York, December 14, 1858.
"Rev. J. E. Tyler,—
"My dear Sir: You ask for my recollections of your honored father, as president of my Alma Mater. I regret that I can furnish but little in that relation. He remained at the head of the institution some two years only after I was matriculated.
"The two lower classes had, of course, much less intercourse with him than those more advanced. You could doubtless obtain more ample information from those who were Seniors under him, and who had more largely the benefit of his instruction. Such impressions as I have, however, I am happy to give.
"It was when a member of Kimball Union Academy, in preparation for college, if I mistake not, that I first set eyes on his commanding form, and listened to the impressive tones of his voice. That academy, as you know, is about a dozen miles from Hanover. Not long before the graduation of one of its classes, he visited the place, and preached on the Sabbath. It is not impossible that his visit had some reference to the fact that there were among us so many candidates for college life. It was, at all events, well for Dartmouth that he came. Judging from the influence on my mind, I cannot doubt that not a few were the more inclined, for what they saw of him, to connect themselves with the institution over which he presided.
"It was the year before I entered college, I think, that is, in 1825-26, that Dartmouth was blessed with one of the most remarkable revivals of religion it has ever enjoyed. Transformations of character were wrought then which have borne the test of decades of years. Some of the finest minds in college were brought under the power of the gospel—minds that have since shone as bright lights in the world.
"When I entered the college, I found him dignified, yet affable and fatherly in his bearing. His preaching then, as we often heard him in the village church, was marked by the same simplicity, clearness, and logical force, the same scripturalness, fullness of doctrine, and evangelical earnestness, that characterized his subsequent ministrations. He preached not to the fancy, but to the conscience and the heart. He confined not himself to hortatory appeals, nor did he, in any wise, skim over the surface of things; but, as both my notes and recollections of his college sermons assure me, he was apt to handle, and that vigorously, the high topics of theology. He gave us not milk alone, but strong meat. Yet have I seldom known a man so remarkable for making an abstruse subject plain to every hearer."
Rev. George Punchard, of Boston, and Rev. Nathaniel Folsom, D.D., professor in Meadville College, Pa., have furnished their recollections respecting the revival in Dartmouth College, in the year 1826, to which allusion is made by Dr. Smith.
The former says: