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sentative in the Legislature in 1819. His wife died in 1822, less than nine years after their marriage. From this time he and his sisters lived together, and they looked after him and his three motherless children. A fourth child had died when quite young.

At one time he was much involved in the religious polemics on the orthodox Trinitarian side against the Unitarians. He afterwards wrote, 'Too much was sharply said on both sides in that contest.' Later, in 1850, he became an Episcopalian.

The great work of Dana's life was his influence upon the literary development of the country. This was felt both through the model of his own writings, prose and poetry, and by his criticisms and lectures. American attempts at literature had, before him, been unreal in sentiment and florid in style. His influence was for vigor of thought, sincerity, and simplicity in expression. Writing of 'Old Times' in 1817, he deplored the loss of a 'rough and honest manliness which dared at times to be a boy.' The political failings of his own day, the exaggerated strivings for 'equality,' the prevalence of a utilitarian view of life, the sentiment of chivalry towards women, the value and beauty of poetry as an element in living such were his themes. Looking forward to a day when an improved taste would attend a growth in wealth, he ventured to predict 'that we shall, one day, buy pictures as well as looking-glasses, and that in good time, an author will be set as much by as an Argand lamp or an imported chimney-piece.'1

Perhaps the greatest work of Dana lay in his oft-repeated lectures on literature, including several on Shakespeare. Introductory subjects were 'The Effect of our Daily Life upon our Feelings and Perceptions in Relation to Literature,' and 'The Effect of Literature on our Character and Daily Life.' These lectures were delivered in numerous cities, towns, and colleges, and many a one has testified that he owed his first real understanding and love of literature to the inspiration received at those addresses.

Dana's sensitiveness, with all his talk of being natural and direct, made him seem reserved; but this arose from a feeling, expressed in his criticism on the 'Sketch Book,' against 'laying open to the

His reception by the Saturday Club in 1873 might well have seemed to him a fulfilment of this prophecy. - Editor.

common gaze and common talk feelings, the very life of which is secrecy.'

When aroused by anything that seemed mean or underhand, his moral indignation was intense. He was sometimes severe, but usually was kindly and courteous, gentle, and obliging. He was fond of music, and greatly encouraged his daughter in her singing; was one of the founders of the Harvard Musical Association, and attended the Symphony Concerts and the Händel and Haydn oratorios from their foundation to the last year of his life.

Though usually reserved, he had a strong sense of humor, and I have heard many a peal of laughter from him. Indeed, when the family were together, and his sons (R. H. Dana, Jr., and Edmund), his sister Elizabeth, and his daughter Charlotte were present, the talk was of a very high order, such as one rarely hears now, going into philosophy, literature, art, history, mythology, or music with an ease and delight that were fascinating. And even on such lofty subjects I hardly remember such a gathering without an accompaniment of fun, or rapid thrust of wit that would bring down the house.

His love of nature was great. He was the first Boston resident who bought a place and built on the beautiful north shore of Massachusetts Bay. There, at his Manchester home, he loved to stay late into the autumn and wander about the woods, walk back and forth on the beach in sunshine or storm, and at night look out upon the moonlit waters and distant lighthouses.

As I remember Longfellow once said to me when I was in college, his poems were only too few. "The Buccaneer' is the most dramatic, 'The Little Beach Bird' the most commonly known. Apropos of his writing so little poetry, James Russell Lowell, in his 'Fable for Critics,' says:

'Here comes Dana, abstractedly loitering along,
Involved in a paulo-post-future of song,

Who'll be going to write what'll never be written

Till the Muse, ere he thinks of it, gives him the mitten,
Who is so well aware of how things should be done,
That his own works displease him before they're begun.'

• He bought May 22, 1845. Henry Lee bought October 24, 1845.

There is no doubt that self-distrust and over-criticism of himself had much to do with his not producing more poetry, but two things had a direct bearing. One was his want of sufficient means. No poems in his early day were remunerative to the writer in this country. Dana was brought up with a dread of debt, and into debt his publications were bringing him. Moreover, his natural delicacy and refinement of thought were almost morbidly increased at times by the ill-health which followed him ever after his brave act during the plague in his early manhood. An edition of almost all his poems was published in England and there met, it is reported, greater financial success than his publications in America. In this profit, however, Mr. Dana did not share from the lack of any international copyright laws or treaties.

His three novels, printed in The Idle Man, were short. 'Edward and Mary' was a sweet and simple love story. The plots of 'Tom Thornton' and 'Paul Felton' were horrible, and much after the manner of Charles Brockden Brown. The thoughts were clear, the style direct, the morals high, and the whole entirely free from the prolixity of better-known novelists. Mr. Dana was very fond of the best acting, as is shown by his essay on Kean's representations of Shakespeare.

In 1867 he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Williams College. He lived to his ninety-second year, in the full possession of all his faculties, dying February 2, 1879.

WOLCOTT GIBBS

1822-1908

To the writings of three eminent chemists' who had been the pupils and the friends of Dr. Gibbs I owe the materials of the following sketch of his life and work.

2

Oliver Wolcott Gibbs was born in New York, February, 1822, of a scientific family. His father, Colonel George Gibbs, who had a large estate on Long Island, was an enthusiastic mineralogist. His collection, later sold to Yale College, became the nucleus of the great cabinet there. The ancestors of his mother, whose maiden name was Laura Wolcott, had been men of mark either in the establishment of the Republic, the Cabinet, Congress, the Courts, or as Governors of Connecticut. The house in New York was a gathering place of cultivated people, and the boy, during five years' schooling in Boston, and in summer vacations, found in Mount Vernon Street (or Newport in vacation) a kindly welcome at the home of Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing, with whom his family were connected by marriage. He prepared in New York for Columbia College, and graduated there in 1841. At his father's country place at Sunwick he had pursued science in boyish ways, and when a junior in college, in the period when the rudiments of science were sparingly conveyed by textbooks and a few lectures, the boy did original work and published an account of a new form of galvanic battery, using carbon as the inactive plate.

On graduating, he went to Philadelphia as assistant in the laboratory of Professor Robert Hare, to fit himself for teaching chemistry; then entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, and received its degree as Doctor of Medicine. He never practised, but his training in anatomy, physiology, and, later, surgery and therapeutics, came to his aid in his researches as to the

* Professor Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, Charles Loring Jackson, and Theodore W. Richards. 'Oliver' was early dropped from the name.

effect of chemical agents on the animal organism. Then, searching out the best places in Germany and France to pursue his studies, he 'became a chemist in the largest sense; and not a mere subspecialist.'

Returning from Europe, Dr. Gibbs soon was appointed Professor of Chemistry in the Free Academy of New York, and, as a biographer says, 'there found himself'; became associate editor of the American Journal of Science, which he greatly helped by his clear abstracts of important foreign work; with Professor Genth gave new knowledge to the world about the ammonio-cobalt bases; and in 1863 was called to the Harvard chair of 'Rumford Professor of the Application of Science to the Useful Arts.' He was also to take charge of the chemical laboratory of the Lawrence Scientific School. Socially his position was pleasant, for Agassiz and Peirce appreciated his qualities, and he made friends among the scientific men and in Cambridge society.

By his students, men who were not taking chemistry as part of the collegiate course, but had come with earnest purpose to get instruction from the best masters on subjects connected with science, he was much valued. For the teaching in the Scientific School was far from the methods obtaining in the college curriculum. Students worked things out themselves, under the eye of the master, who did not need examinations to know where they stood; and the foolish, iron-clad traditions prevailing among undergraduates in the regular college course that students must never have any but the strictest official relations with their instructors, lest they be deemed 'toadies' of their natural enemies — had no standing there. In producing this happy change in the relation of teacher and student Gibbs and Agassiz were pioneers, and are gratefully remembered by their pupils. 'It was really the German University method.'

Dr. Gibbs's usefulness as a teacher was much diminished by the consolidation of the Scientific School Laboratory with that of the College, which left to him only the Rumford Professorship. Fortunately his private means enabled him to pursue chemical research in a laboratory of his own, and he now had more time for such work. After this change in 1873 he lectured on the spectro

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