“Did I ever study projectiles?” asked Story, puzzled.
“Certainly you did,” said I. “You used to go up to Peirce Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the summer when you were a junior, with a blue book which had a white back.”
“I know I did,” said Story; “and was I studying projectiles then? This is the first time I ever heard of it.”
And I tell that story because it illustrates well enough the divorce between theory and fact which is possible in education. I do not tell it by way of blaming Professor Peirce or Harvard College. Story was not to be an artilleryman, nor were any of the rest of us, so far as we knew. Anyway, the choice of our specialty in life was to be kept as far distant as was possible.
CHAPTER III
LITERARY WORK IN COLLEGE
“Harvardiana,” a college magazine which ran for four years, belongs exactly to the period of Lowell’s college life. Looking over it now, it seems to me like all the rest of them. That is, it is as good as the best and as bad as the worst.
There is not any great range for such magazines. The articles have to be short. And the writers know very little of life. All the same, a college magazine gives excellent training. Lowell was one editor of the fourth volume of “Harvardiana.” I suppose he then read proof for the first time, and in a small way it introduced him into the life of an editor,—a life in which he afterwards did a great deal of hard work, which he did extremely well, as we shall presently see.
The editorial board of the year before, from whose hands the five editors of the class of ’38 took “Harvardiana,” was a very interesting circle of young men. They were, by the way, classmates and friends of Thoreau, who lived to be better known than they; but I think he was not of the editorial committee. The magazine was really edited in that year entirely by Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, and Charles Stearns Wheeler. Horatio Hale, the philologist, was in the same class and belonged to the same set. He was named as one of the editors. But he was appointed to Wilkes’s exploring expedition a year before he graduated,—a remarkable testimony, this, to his early ability in the lines of study in which he won such distinction afterwards. It is interesting and amusing to observe that his first printed work was a vocabulary of the language of some Micmac Indians, who camped upon the college grounds in the summer of 1834. Hale learned the language from them, made a vocabulary, and then set up the type and printed the book with his own hand. Hayward, Hildreth, and Wheeler, who carried on the magazine for its third volume, all died young, before the age of thirty. Hayward had written one or more of the lives in Sparks’s “American Biography,” Wheeler had distinguished himself as a Greek scholar here and in Europe, and Hildreth, as a young poet, had given promise for what we all supposed was to be a remarkable future.
To this little circle somebody addressed himself who wanted to establish a chapter of Alpha Delta Phi in Cambridge in 1836. Who this somebody was, I do not know. I wish I did. But he came to Cambridge and met these leaders of the literary work of the classes of ’37 and ’38, and among them they agreed on the charter members for the formation of the Alpha Delta Phi chapter at Harvard. The list of the members from the Harvard classes of 1837 and 1838 shows that these youngsters knew already who their men of letters were. It consists of fourteen names: John Bacon, John Fenwick Eustis, Horatio Hale, Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, Charles Stearns Wheeler, Henry Williams, James Ivers Trecothick Coolidge, Henry Lawrence Eustis, Nathan Hale, Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Woodman Scates.