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derivation, of the structure of sentences and verses, the syntax and the prosody, the meters and the figures, the formulas and the equations, the proportions and the progressions, the infinitudes and the infinitesimals, are but the footprints of the soarings and searchings of the master-minds of the race. By these alone can we reach the wonders of Homer, the sense of Plato, the fervor and logic of Demosthenes, the majesty of Virgil, the sublimities of Milton, the science of Newton, and the generalizations of La Place. Astronomy, with all its immensities and sublimities, is but the result of the thorough drill in routine teaching which nature has given the race. The difference between Ptolemy and Copernicus, between Kepler and Newton, was but the forcing upon the same human mind the revolutions of moon and sun, of planet and system, until their lessons were learned and their laws discovered. The comet and the eclipse foretold to the infancy of the race pestilence and war; but to its maturer age law, wisdom, and love. And so a life spent in routine and drill, or, I would rather say, a life lived in routine and drill, may rise itself, and raise others to the highest altitudes that have been reached by the human mind.

If in this general view of Mr. Hammond's life and labors I have not claimed too much for him, it is worth our while to examine more minutely the elements of his manhood, his teaching, and his scholarship. He was built upon a large plan in every way, physically, intellectually, and morally. His person I need not pause to describe. We miss from our meetings this week the manly form and noble bearing, the ample features, the expressive eye, all which combined to impress even the stranger with a consciousness of a superior presence, and the earnest grasp of that great hand which carried to its fingers' ends the pulsations of one of the largest hearts that ever beat in a human bosom. His frank and genial manners were the natural language of his nature, without the slightest trace of art. His social qualities were of the very best; open and accessible to all, he was a capital talker, and, what is still more rare, an equally good listener. He was always ready to instruct and no less earnest to be instructed. He appeared to great advantage in social discussion, and never more so than when he encountered a vigorous and healthy opposition. He had in large measure the qualities which we sometimes call magnetic in their influence.

In the lighter forms of humor, the pun, and repartee, in the ra

pier-like play of fancy and banter, he possessed no remarkable skill and seldom indulged in them; but he would sometimes use the broadsword of wit with masterly effect.

His emotional nature was one of great richness and strength. He could hate well, to use an expression of Arnold's, though his hatred never seemed to be directed against persons, but rather against principles and systems. It was that perfect hatred of which the Psalmist speaks. His love was fervent, and his friendships choice and permanent. He was the pride and delight of the social circle. His laughter was the veritable ἄσβεστος γέλως οι Olympus, not "the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind" for it was scarcely audible, but a delicious and contagious thrill which shook his whole being, which opened the secret chambers of his soul, and brought forth to play upon his countenance the finest feelings that belong to our nature.

The reciprocal attachment between him and his native town continued through life. When the people of Union repaired and rededicated their meeting-house, it was Mr. Hammond who was summoned to preach the sermon; if they were to celebrate the fourth of July, Mr. Hammond was their orator; if Tolland County would celebrate the great centennial of 1776, it must be with a profusion of antiquarian and historical lore which Mr. Hammond alone could furnish. When the trustees of Monson Academy would celebrate their semi-centennial anniversary they recalled Mr. Hammond from Groton to review its history. When the trustees at Groton would dedicate their new academy building, they sent to Monson for Mr. Hammond to come and teach them the history And when the shot of

of academic education in New England. the assassin destroyed the nation's chief magistrate, the people of Monson, forgetting sect and party, rushed to the swelling heart and eloquent lips of their Preceptor to find utterance for their grief and righteous indignation. These facts show how strongly his character impressed itself wherever it had been felt, and that the close of official relations was no hindrance to the continued exercise of friendship and affection; the man remained after the teacher had departed. It was, however, in the more private interview

that all the resources of his social and domestic life were shown. One such you will permit me to mention, and excuse my personal intrusion. We had spent a long evening together; we had passed from topic to topic, from history to biography, from biography to

literature; and as the sounds of business and active life were hushed around us, we passed easily from the Allegro to the Penseroso of our lives, when he threw open the inmost portals of his heart, and the scholar and the teacher gave place to the husband and the father, while he told me of the great blow which had almost wrecked his life, the loss of an only son, in whom he had discovered "a salient, living spring of generous and manly action."

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I had scarcely before realized how a great nature could suffer, what a weight of sorrow the human soul could bear. He seemed to me like Burke as he has revealed himself to us in passing through the same great agony,—the loss of his son Richard, and the language of our friend can only be fitly reported in the words of the suffering statesman. "The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks, which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors. I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate upon the earth. There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. .. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation that act of piety which he would have performed to me." The mournful scene, it may be thought, should have been passed over as unsuited to this occasion; but the last twelve years of Mr. Hammond's life could not have been touched without it. It paralyzed him morally for a time, and he sought relief in closer application and harder work.

Scholarship must take its character largely from the manhood on which it is grafted. The qualities which I have noticed as belonging to the man were not obscured, but heightened and glorified in the scholar. The strong moral and religious forces of his nature moulded his tastes, gave directions to his thoughts, and determined his fields of investigation. His scholarship was strongly AMERICAN, not in a narrow, provincial sense of the term, but in a large and generous sense. It was not the scholarship of the beer garden and the café, nor "raised from the heat of youth, or the vapors of wine." It was NEW ENGLAND scholarship, the scholarship of the Christian home, of the farm, of the district school, of the town-house and the meeting-house, of the academy and the college; the scholarship gathered by the winter fireside, from the hayfield, from the echoes and silences of the primeval forest, from

the blazing suns of summer, and the glistening, piercing frosts of winter. It was PURITAN scholarship; but it was the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, of Milton, Hampden, of Baxter, and Howe, the Puritanism that soared rather than that which sunk; that carried the mind upwards to the eternal throne rather than downward to Chaos and eternal night.

Into this strong American fabric he incorporated elements of strength and beauty from other sources. His tastes were strongly classic, and his classical reading was select and thorough. He was not content to spend all his strength upon the curriculum required in the preparation of boys for college. He knew that the scholar's mind must increase the extent as well as the intention of its knowledge. Hence, along with those studies which his daily work required, and whose regular return he greeted with increasing pleasure and intenser toil, he cultivated a collateral field, and in it attained to distinction and usefulness. This field was the intellectual and religious history of New England. To some this choice may seem unclassical, and beneath the dignity of Greek and Roman story. But Mr. Hammond saw in the historic Mayflower, with its hundred souls seeking freedom to worship God on the wild New England shore, as high a purpose, as brave a spirit, and withal as much poetry as in the Argo, with her mythic and piratic crew, seeking a golden fleece at Colchis. He knew as much as anybody of the migration of the Dorians, and their re-colonization of their ancestral home in the Peloponnesus; and he knew vastly more than most American scholars of the twenty thousand, and no more, men, women, and children who crossed three thousand miles of ocean to found a church without a bishop, and a state without a king. (And they did it, too.) He felt a scholar's interest in the story of Marathon, but a patriot's fire in the struggle at Bunker Hill. He performed with unflagging zeal, the annual voyage in epic story of the seven years' wanderings from Troy to the Tiber; but he saw a nobler epos for some future Virgil, in the growth of empire in America, in the long contest with France, in the triumph over Spain, in the gift of Saxon laws and manners to the continent.

With these treasures at his disposal, when called, year after year, to address his townsmen on the Fourth of July, he had something more to give them than the stale platitudes usually heard on that occasion; old facts were clothed with new life, and facts

just passing into oblivion were reclaimed, and made living stones in the fabrics of local and national history. Large accumulations of historical researches are among his papers, though not in a form suitable for publication.

What gave life to Arnold's teaching, was, not so much that he knew more of ancient history than others, as that he knew modern so much better; and that he saw in both ancient and modern history the same human nature unfolding itself; and, what is more, he showed from the passing life how the life which is passed was lived. Burke forecast from the revolt at Corcyra, the course of the French revolution. Dr. Hammond made Greek colonization tell on English, French, and Spanish colonization in America, and these colonies again illustrate the struggles and controversies between Dorian, Æolian, and Athenian colonies and the parent states. His monograph on the New England academies and classical schools is the best that has been written on that subject. It only needs completion, according to the original plan, to fill a large gap in our educational history. He left in manuscript a life of Samuel Peters, which is said to be of great historic value.

In speaking of Mr. Hammond as a teacher, I labor under the disadvantage of having never been in his class-room. I have, however, seen specimens of his work. On leaving college, in 1841, I became a tutor, and in the first class that came under my care I noticed a young man1 of superior character and scholarship, who had evidently come to college with aims quite different from many who were found there. Possessed of good native powers, he had somewhere learned to respect himself and become inspired with an earnest zeal in the pursuit of knowledge. I had, at that time, not heard of Dr. Hammond, and it was not until some years afterward that I learned that I had been admiring the handiwork of one who had become my acquaintance and friend. You will be glad to learn what he has to say of his preceptor. "He

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was," he says, in a letter bearing the date of December 2, 1879, teacher whom I have never ceased to venerate and to love. He had recently graduated from Yale College when I came under his instruction, and I remember as though it were but yesterday, the enthusiasm and zeal with which he engaged in the work of classical instruction. Genial, energetic, and thorough; these are the words that must be used to characterize his manner in the

1 Mr. Isaac F. Cady, of Barrington, R. I.

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