Proceedings Volume 14 – 1919 [PDF]

The Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society, Volume 14, 1919 Table Of Contents OFFICERS...........................................................................................................................4 FORTY-SIXTH MEETING........................................................................................................5 CELEBRATION OF THE ONE-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL ADDRESS........................................................................................................................5 BY CHARLES WILLIAM ELLIOT POEM- "THE RETURNING".................................................................................................12 BY PERCY MACKAYE ADDRESS.......................................................................................................................18 BY BLISS PERRY FORTY-SEVENTH MEETING..................................................................................................30 THE STREETS OF CAMBRIDGE, THEIR ORIGIN AND HISTORY..............................................31 BY LEWIS MOREY HASTINGS THE ENGLISH ANCESTRAL HOMES OF THE FOUNDERS OF CAM- BRIDGE.....................................................................................................................79 BY JOSEPH GARDNER BARTLETT FORTY-EIGHTH MEETING....................................................................................................104 THE WILLIAM GRAY HOUSE IN CAMBRIDGE ....................................................................104 BY ROLAND GRAY MRS. ALEXANDER AND HER DAUGHTER FRANCESCA.........................................................106 BY EUNICE FARLEY FELTON FORTY-NINTH MEETING...................................................................................................114 REPORT OF SECRETARY AND COUNCIL..........................................................................114 REPORT OF CURATOR...................................................................................................117 REPORT OF TREASURER................................................................................................120 ELIAS HOWE, JR., INVENTOR OF THE SEWING MACHINE...................................................122 BY PERCY H. EPLER OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY 1918-1919 President.......................................................WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER Vice presidents.......................................... ANDREW McFARLANED DAVIS WORTHINGTON CHAUNCY FORD HOLLIS RUSSELL BAILEY Secretary.......................................................SAMUEL FRANCIS BATCHELDER Treasurer......................................................HENRY HERBERT EDES Curator..........................................................WILLIAM COOLIDGE LANE Council HOLLIS RUSSEL BAILEY WORTHINGTON CHAUNCEY FORD SAMUEL FRANCIS BATCHELDER MARY ISABELLA GOZZALDI FRANK GAYLORD COOK GEORGE HODGES RICHARD HENRY DANA WILLIAM COOLIDGE LANE ANDREW McFARLAND DAVIS ALICE MARY LONGFELLOW HENRY HERBERT EDES FRED NORRIS ROBINSON WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER PROCEEDINGS OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FORTY-SIXTH MEETING THE FORTY-SIXTH MEETING OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY was a special public meeting held in Sanders Theatre on the evening of February 22, 1919, to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Russell Lowell. The president of the Society, William Roscoe Thayer, LL.D., presided and, after a few introductory remarks, presented the speakers. The order of exercises was as follows: READING OF A PORTION OF THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION ODE --- PROFESSOR CHARLES T. COPELAND ADDRESS --- PRESIDENT EMERITUS CHARLES W. ELIOT POEM: THE RETURNING --- PERCY MACKATE ADDRESS --- PROFESSOR BLISS PERRY ADDRESS BY CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT President Emeritus of Harvard University THE part assigned to me in these commemorative exercises is the consideration of Lowell's career as a college professor, his influence on University teaching, and his conception of a University's function in the life of a nation. 5 He was appointed Smith Professor of the French and Spanish languages and literatures and Professor of Belles-Lettres in 1855, his only predecessors in that chair being George Ticknor, the historian of Spanish literature, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, each of whom held that professorship for eighteen years. Lowell was titular professor on the Abiel Smith Endowment for thirty-one years, but was absent in Europe for something more than ten years out of that period. He had no natural inclination towards the work of a teacher; but he welcomed his appointment to the professorship, because it gave him a small but sure income as a supplement to the somewhat unreliable proceeds of his literary labors. It was a course of lectures on English literature at the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855 which occasioned his election to the Smith professorship. He then for the first time appeared formally as a critic and historian of literature. Up to that date Lowell would have been most correctly described as a man of letters and a rising poet. His most important function as Smith Professor was from the beginning the delivery of one lecture a week on modern literature. He had no fancy for this occupation. When he was in Europe in 1855—56, making preparatory studies in Germany and Italy, he wrote to a friend about getting "quietly settled again at Elmwood with the Old Man of the Sea of my first course of lectures off my shoulders." In September, 1856, when he had returned to Cambridge he says, "I have not begun to lecture yet, but am to deliver my old Lowell Institute course first, and then some on German literature and Dante." When he was thinking to go from Germany into Italy in January, 1856, he refers to his College appointment thus: "It takes me a great while to learn that I have a tether round my leg — I who have been used to gallop over the prairies at will — and I find myself brought up now and then with a sharp jerk that is anything but pleasant to the tibia. But I suppose I shall learn to stand quietly up to my manger at last." About the same time he wrote to another friend, "Yesterday I began my lectures and came off better than I expected; for I am always a great coward beforehand. I hate lecturing; for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn all about anything, unless indeed it be some piece of ill luck, and then one has the help of one's friends you know." In May, 1857,he 6 writes to his friend Stillman, "While my lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me." The delivery of these lectures on Modern Literature once a week remained Lowell's chief teaching function for twenty years; but at intervals he also gave instruction in elementary Spanish and Italian, when no instructor had been obtained in these languages for the current year or term, or when one or more of the teachers of these subjects fell ill. For example in 1859-60, the study of all modern languages being optional, Lowell taught the elements of Spanish and Italian to volunteers three times a week for each language. This service must have been to him a real affliction and a serious interruption of his active work as editor and essayist. Again, in 1860—61, there being no instructor in Italian, Professor Lowell gave the instruction in that language in the senior year to an elective class three times a week. In 1869, Assistant Professor Cutler being ill, Lowell says: "I am shepherding his flocks for him meanwhile — now leading them among the sham-classic pastures of Corneille, where a colonnade supplies the dearth of herbage; now along the sunny broad-viewed uplands of Goethe's prose. It is eleven o'clock and I am just back from my class. At four I go down again for two hours of German, and at half-past seven I begin on two hours of Dante." The last clause is an allusion, to Lowell's evening meetings with a few advanced students of Italian in his study at Elmwood, meetings which were maintained throughout most of Lowell's active service as a professor. There he gave a few appreciative students a critical survey of Dante's greatest works, revealing to them the innumerable beauties of the poet's thought and style, and also his teaching of liberty, toleration, and nobler prospects for mankind. In these intimate meetings Lowell was at his best as a teacher, because he was much of the time teaching the beauty in the thoughts, phrases, and words of a transcendent genius. He illustrated these lessons with ideas, words, and phrases drawn from other literatures, especially from English literature. His own memory for choice words and felicitous phrases was marvellous; for he remembered not only the words and phrases themselves, but the places where he had seen them. In the autumn of 1872 I was asking him about the word "rote," then in use among sailors and 7 fishermen on the coast of Maine to indicate the sound of waves beating on a rocky shore, not on a pebbly or sandy beach. Lowell rose from his chair, climbed to a top shelf in his library, took down a small book of the seventeenth century, turned its leaves for a moment, and handed me the page on which the word "rote" occurred in precisely the sense in which a man born on the island where I had my summer camp used the word, when we were trying to cross Frenchman's Bay in a thick fog. Suddenly he shouted to me from the bow, "We're just right. I hear the rote on Stave Island Thrumbcap." Lowell resumed his easychair

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