JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE

1810-1888

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE, who was elected to the Saturday Club in 1877, had for more than a quarter of a century been one of the leading ministers in Boston, a man whose life, in the words of Edward Everett Hale, 'for nearly fifty years touches every important movement of that time.' Born in 1810, he passed most of his boyhood in the home of James Freeman, Minister of King's Chapel, for whom he was named, and whom he always thought and spoke of as his grandfather.' The home of his father and mother was near by in Newton, then a rural community, so that in his childhood he was not separated from them nor from the companionship of his brothers and sisters. His maternal grandfather, General William Hull, lived on a farm only a mile or two away, and one of James Freeman Clarke's first books was a vindication of General Hull for the surrender of Detroit. His early education was given him by his grandfather Freeman, and in the sketch of his own life which he began in 1883, but never brought beyond 1840, he lingers affectionately over the memory, recalling how he was taught Latin and Greek and elementary mathematics by what seemed to him the natural method, which made it a pleasure to learn. By the time he was ten he had read 'a good deal of Ovid, some odes of Horace, a little of Virgil, the Gospel of Matthew in Greek, and had gone as far as cubic equations in algebra.' He had the run of the library, in which the English classics of the age of Queen Anne had a large place. When he was sent to the Boston Latin School, where he was a contemporary of Charles Sumner, Robert C. Winthrop, and Wendell Phillips, he found the regimen much less to his taste-memorizing Latin grammar to begin with- and expresses himself strongly on the subject. The results cannot have been so bad after all, for he speaks elsewhere of the interest in the classics which had there been aroused.

In Harvard College he was a member of the famous class of 1829 'Mrs. Freeman was his grandmother.

— with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Peirce, Benjamin R. Curtis, George T. Bigelow, and others hardly less distinguished. Of the educational methods of the college he had an even more unfavorable opinion than of the Latin School. There he had been interested in Ovid and Virgil, in Anacreon and Lucian, in algebra and geometry; but in college 'we were expected to wade through Homer as though the Iliad were a bog, and it was our duty to get along at such a rate per diem. Nothing was said of the glory and the grandeur, the tenderness and the charm of this immortal epic. The melody of the hexameters was never suggested to us. Professor Popkin would look over his spectacles at us, and, with pencil in hand, mark our recitation as good or bad, but never a word to help us over a difficulty, or to explain anything obscure.' If the College, according to this testimony, did not do much for its students but mark and rank them, it did not exact much of them, and left them time to educate themselves. 'What we did not learn in the regular course of study, we learned outside of it. What we did. not acquire from books, we taught each other.' 'Our real professors of rhetoric were Charles Lamb and Coleridge, Walter Scott and Wordsworth,' and Clarke records the joy they had in a chance discovery of Sir Thomas Browne. Coleridge's 'Aids to Reflection,' and his other prose works made, as for so many in his generation, an epoch in his intellectual history. Truly, for such students, the college years 'were not wasted.' Dr. Follen, who came to the college as Instructor in 1825, introduced two novelties, gymnastic exercises and instruction in the German language. Of the gymnastics and his own part in them Clarke speaks with evident pleasure in the recollection, but he probably acquired also some proficiency in German, for in the next years he was reading authors not generally affected by novices.

After a year's interval he entered the Divinity School, and graduated in 1833. In his year were his college classmates, William Henry Channing, Chandler Robbins, and Samuel May, all men of distinction subsequently in the ministry. Channing wrote years after in a memoir of Margaret Fuller, in the preparation of which he was associated with Clarke and R. W. Emerson, 'My most intimate friend in the Theological School, James Freeman Clarke,