Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

By the fireside, quaintly moulded
Oft his humid boots would lie;
And his queer surtout was folded
On some strange old chair to dry.

In the yard where now before me
Underclothes, wind-wafted hang
Waved the banners of an army;
Warriors strode with martial clang.

These things now are all departed,
With us on the earth no more,
But the chieftain, noble-hearted,
Comes to visit me once more.

In he comes without permission,
Sits him down before mine eyes,
Then I tremble and demnition
Curious thoughts within me rise.

Slow he speaks in accents solemn,
Life is all an empty hum,
Man, by adulation only
Can'st thou ever great become.

I ought perhaps to mention a young man of most brilliant promise, an excellent scholar and a great favorite, who died before the class graduated, on a voyage to the East Indies which he undertook in the hope of restoring his health,— Augustus Enoch Daniels. He left behind him one bon mot which is worth recording. We were translating one day one of the choruses in AEschylus, I think in the Agamemnon, where the phrase occurs [Greek omitted], meaning "couches unvisited by the wind," which he most felicitously rendered "windlass bedsteads." Such is the vanity of human life that it is not uncommon that some hardworking, faithful and bright scholar is remembered only for one single saying, as Hamilton in the House of Commons was remembered for his single speech. Another instance of this is that worthy and excellent teacher of Latin and Professor of History, Henry W. Torrey. He was an instructor in college in our time, afterward left the college to teach a young ladies' school and came back again later as a Professor. I presume if any member of the class of 1846 were asked about Torrey he would say: "Oh, yes. He was an excellent Latin scholar, an excellent teacher in elocution and in history. But all I remember of him is that on one occasion a man who professed to be learned in Egyptian antiquities advertised a course of lectures, one of which was to be illustrated by unrolling from a mummy the bandages which had been untouched since its interment, many centuries before Christ. The savant claimed to be able to read the inscription on the cloth in which the mummy was wrapped and declared that it was the corpse of an Egyptian princess, whose name and history he related. Having given this narrative and excited the expectation of his auditors, the wrappers were taken off and, alas, it turned out to be the body of a man. The poor professor was, of course, much disconcerted and his lectures, I believe, came to a sudden ending. Mr. Torrey said that 'it was undoubtedly the corpse of Spurius Mummius.'"

But no account of my class ought to omit the name of Henry Whitney. He was a universal favorite. In all the disputes which arose in all the divisions of sets or sections, Whitney maintained the regard and affection of the whole class.

After graduating he was a very successful and influential business man in Boston and was President of the Boston & Providence Railroad, which under his masterly administration, attained a very high degree of prosperity. I think he corresponded with every member of the class, and did more to preserve and create a kindly class feeling than any other member. It seemed when he died as if half the college had died. He was a man of great refinement and scholarship, and was fond of collecting rare books. He had a great many editions of Milton which he liked to exhibit to his friends. He had a most delightful wit, and was the author of some very good songs and other humorous poetry.

I do not of course undertake to give sketches of all my classmates, either the living or the dead, or those who have attained distinction as useful and honorable members of society. So far as I know their career since they left college, there is none of them of whom the class or the college need be ashamed.

The different classes had not much intercourse with each other unless it happened in the case of boys who came from the same town, or who came from the same school, until late in the college course, when the members of the Hasty Pudding Club and the Porcellian, the two principal secret societies, formed intimacies beyond their own class in the meetings of those clubs. There were some persons in the classes near mine, both below and above me, with whom I had an acquaintance in college which grew into a cordial friendship in the Law School or in later life. Perhaps, taking him all together, the most brilliant man in Harvard in my time was John Felton. He went to California and became afterward unquestionably the greatest lawyer they have ever had on the Pacific Coast. He was in the class after mine. I knew him slightly in our undergraduate days. But when I went to the Law School in September, 1847, we boarded together in the same house. We speedily became intimate and used to take long walks together of three or four hours every day. We rambled about Watertown and Brighton and Somerville and West Cambridge and had long discussions about law and politics and poetry and metaphysics and literature and our own ambitions and desires. We were constantly in each other's rooms, and often sat up together, sometimes until the constellations set, with the wasteful, time-consuming habits of boyhood.