Professor Cornelius Conway Felton

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

PEOPLE OF WALDEN:

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

WALDEN: There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not PEOPLE OF philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once WALDEN admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier- like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1807

November 6, Friday: Cornelius Conway Felton was born in West Newbury, Massachusetts to Cornelius Conway Felton and Anna Morse Felton.1

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6 day 6 of 11 M / Our friends have generally return’d from Quarterly Meeting, I understand they had a very good meeting, & some of them refreshed in the best sense Spent the eveng at O Ws & was rather humoursly entertaine’d by B H’s storys the time passed pleasantly but I apprehend not so proffitably as it might have done. I hope no harm will come of it & if I had done nothing this eveng to be dissatisfied with, but that, I believe I should be better quallified to write than I am now RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1. The elder Cornelius Conway Felton had been born on June 28, 1784 to Thomas Felton and Martha Conway Felton, and would die on July 23, 1849. He had gotten married first with Lucy Torrey Boyton and then with Anna Morse, daughter of Abigail Bridges. This 2d marriage produced not only Cornelius Conway Felton (Junior) on November 5, 1807 but also, on July 17, 1809, a younger son Samuel Morse Felton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1826

Heinrich Heine’s DIE HARZREISE (THE HARZ JOURNEY).

The 2d American edition of Edward Everett’s English translation of Professor Philip Karl Buttmann’s GRIECHISCHE SCHUL-GRAMMATIK, titled GREEK GRAMMAR FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS, FROM THE GERMAN OF PHILIP BUTTMANN (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company), prepared by George Bancroft and George Henry Bode at the Round Hill School in Northampton.

Harvard College student Cornelius Conway Felton was at least in part supporting himself during his education by teaching one winter in Bolton and another winter in Concord, and at the Round Hill School in Northampton. During the two years 1827 to 1829 he would have charge of the high school in Livingston County, New York. He must have been an exceedingly disciplined scholar for also, in this his senior year, he was serving as one of the conductors of a student periodical, the Harvard Register.

(At the Concord Free Public Library, under Accession # 10443, is Henry David Thoreau’s personal copy, presented to the library by Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau in 1874. On the front free endpaper is inscribed “D.H. Thoreau / Cambridge / Mass 1833.”)2 AS STUDIED BY THOREAU

2. During this year Professor Buttmann was issuing his ÜBER DIE ENTSTEHUNG DER STERNBILDER AUF DER GRIECHISCHEN SFÄRE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1827

William Davis Ticknor left his home on a farm just outside Lebanon, New Hampshire at the age of 17, to work in the brokerage house of his uncle Benjamin Ticknor in Boston.

Professor Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert was made a professor at the University of München. In this post, attempting to produce a religiously grounded interpretation of the cosmos, he would arouse the antagonism of Lorenz Oken.

Cornelius Conway Felton, who had been at least in part working his way through his education by teaching in Concord and in Boston, and at the Round Hill School in Northampton, at this point graduated from Harvard College. Horatio Wood graduated (his copious and carefully written notes on French and Spanish literature per the lectures of Professor George Ticknor, fresh from the German universities, would be preserved, and under the influence of Dr. Karl Follen, Horatio would persist in being a strenuous runner until the 7th decade of his life).

At the Divinity School, the following gentlemen commenced their studies: • Julian Abbot • Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (A.B. Col. [Columbia College?]) • Francis Cunningham • Joseph Hawley Dorr (A.B. Bowdoin College) • George Washington Hosmer • Josiah Moore • John Owen (A.B. Bowdoin College) • Ephraim Peabody (A.B. Brown University) • Allen Putnam • George Putnam • John Turner Sargent • David Southard • Oliver Stearns

(In these early years of the divinity school there were no formal class graduations, as students would be in the habit of remaining until they wrangled the offer of an appropriate pulpit.) NEW “HARVARD MEN”

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1829

Josiah Quincy, Sr. was appointed President of Harvard College.

After having taught for a couple of years in the Livingstone High School of Geneseo, New York, Cornelius Conway Felton became a tutor at Harvard.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1830

Augustus Addison Gould received the degree of MD at the Harvard Medical School. He would eventually become a doctor and have a successful practice in Boston, but first he needed to make some money (for the grand sum of $50 he would, for instance, catalog some 50,000 pamphlets at the Boston Athenæum into four large folio volumes). Meanwhile he was making the most careful study of natural history, and for two years would teach botany and zoology at Harvard College. He would become a well known specialist in conchology.

Cornelius Conway Felton became a tutor of Greek at Harvard (he would in 1832 be promoted to Professor).

Dr. John Abercrombie’s INQUIRIES CONCERNING THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF MAN AND THE INVESTIGATION OF TRUTH (London). This treatise would eventually be found to have contained nothing of any novelty, and would have no lasting place in the literature of philosophy. It would, however, have a place in Henry Thoreau’s formal education at Harvard, and would guide him toward his negative inference “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers”: DR. JOHN ABERCROMBIE

WALDEN: There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier- like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

HARVARD CATALOG HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1832

Cornelius Conway Felton became Harvard College’s professor of Greek.

Henry Whitney Bellows graduated. He would go on into the Divinity School.

At the Divinity School, the following gentlemen were completing their studies:

John Quimby Day Joseph Angier Charles Babbidge Reuben Bates of Concord Curtis Cutler Charles Andrews Farley Rufus A. Johnson Henry A. Miles (A.B. Brown University) Andrew Preston Peabody John Davis Sweet (A.B. Brown University) Josiah Kendall Waite Horatio Wood JOHN G. P ALFREY THEOLOGY SCHOOLS NEW “HARVARD MEN”

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1833

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton prepared an edition of HOMER, using the illustrations prepared by John Flaxman (1755-1826). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

Chapter 3 (1833-1837) -David Henry Thoreau enters Harvard College (president Josiah Quincy), having barely squeezed by his entrance exams and rooming with Charles S. Wheeler Thoreau’s Harvard curriculum: Greek (8 terms under Felton and Dunkin)-composition, grammar, “Greek Antiquities,” Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer. Latin Grammar (8 terms under Beck and McKean)-composition, “Latin Antiquities,” Livy, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Juvenal. Mathematics (7 terms under Pierce and [Joseph] Lovering) English (8 terms under ET Channing, Giles, W&G Simmons)-grammar, rhetoric, logic, forensics, criticism, elocution, declamations, themes. Mental Philosophy (under Giles) William Paley, Stewart. Natural Philosophy (under [Joseph] Lovering)-astronomy. Intellectual Philosophy (under Bowen) Locke, Say, Story. Theology (2 terms under H Ware)-Paley, Charles Butler, New Testament. Modern Languages (voluntary) Italian (5 terms under Bachi) French (4 terms under Surault) German (4 terms under Bokum) Spanish (2 terms under [Francis] Sales) Attended voluntary lectures on German and Northern literature (Longfellow), mineralogy (Webster), anatomy (Warren), natural history (Harris). Thoreau was an above average student who made mixed impressions upon his classmates. In the spring of ‘36 Thoreau withdrew due to illness -later taught for a brief period in Canton under the Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, a leading New England intellectual who Harding suggests profoundly influenced Thoreau. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)

On a following screen is a list of textbooks that were to be used at Harvard for the school year 1833/1834, together with their list prices at the Brown, Shattuck, and Company bookstore, “Booksellers to the University.”

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Charles Sumner graduated from the Law School of Harvard College.3

Leonhard Usteri had in 1830 produced at Berm an edition of Friedrich August Wolf’s VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DIE VIER ERSTEN GESÄNGE VON HOMER’S ILIAS. At this point Professor of Greek Literature Cornelius Conway Felton provided an English-language annotation of Wolf’s text of HOMĒROU ILIAS. THE ILIAD OF HOMER, FROM THE TEXT OF WOLF. GR. WITH ENGLISH NOTES AND FLAXMAN’S ILLUSTRATIVE DESIGNS. EDITED BY C.C. FELTON (2d edition. Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Co.), a volume that would be required at Harvard and would be found in the personal library of Henry Thoreau.

William Mackay Prichard, son of the Concord trader Moses Prichard, and William Whiting, Jr., son of the Concord carriagemaker Colonel William Whiting, graduated from Harvard.

WILLIAM MACKAY PRICHARD, son of Moses Prichard, was graduated in 1833.4 WILLIAM WHITING [of Concord], son of Colonel William Whiting, was graduated [at Harvard] in 1833.5

3. Just in case you didn’t know: Harvard Law School had been founded with money from the selling of slaves in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. 4. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) 5. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

William Whiting, Jr. would become a lawyer after teaching at Plymouth and Concord, through studying law in Boston and attending the Law School of Harvard.

Manlius Stimson Clarke matriculated, as his father had in 1786, at Harvard. At the age of 15, John Foster Williams Lane returned from his study of the French and Italian languages in Europe and entered Harvard’s freshman class. He would attain a high rank of scholarship in his class and graduate in the same year as Thoreau, with distinction. NEW “HARVARD MEN” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Since Francis Bowen had to work his way through Phillips Exeter Academy and then through Harvard, he was not able to graduate until the age of 22 –quite old for those days– but when he did take his degree, it was summa cum laude and he got a job teaching math at Phillips Exeter Academy. (Then he would teach math at Harvard.)

William Henry Channing graduated from the Harvard Divinity School. Benjamin Peirce wrote the first published history of Harvard, and became a professor there.

At the Divinity School, the following gentlemen completed their studies:

William Ebenezer Abbot (A.B. Bowdoin College) William Andrews William Henry Channing James Freeman Clarke Samuel Adams Devens Theophilus Pipon Doggett Samuel May Albert Clarke Patterson Chandler Robbins Samuel Dowse Robbins Linus Hall Shaw Henry Augustus Walker HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1834

At Harvard College, Professor Cornelius Conway Felton became Eliot Professor of Greek Literature and had David Henry Thoreau as one of his pupils. Professor Felton was positioning an essay in the North American Review in defense the teaching and study of classical mythology, especially Greek mythology, which evidently was considered in need of a defense as it seemed to be encouraging lewdness. For Professor Felton, expurgation of the classic texts to delete titillating stuff did not represent a problem of suppression and censorship, but rather represented the correction of a problem of debasement and inauthenticity, because it was inconceivable that there could have been any actual “food for the passions” in originary authentic works of classicism, or, at least, in works of Greek classicism.

To the scholar we would say, then, expurgate your Horaces and your Ovids, till not an obscene thought shall stain their pages; and you may be sure that nothing will be lost in your enquiries respecting the classic religion.

No, for if you credit Professor Felton’s reconstruction of European history, these dead white men could never have been guilty of worshiping at “altars of indecency and wantonness.”

CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Hanging being a piece of public theater, however, it was sometimes required of a condemned man in this modern decent society that he attire himself in his shroud (a long white linen or cotton garment with open back and long sleeves) prior to the placement of the hood and the noose. Local taverns would sometimes hire “watchers” to keep around-the-clock guard upon a condemned man, not to prevent his escape of course but to ensure that he would not cheat them of their profits from the alcohol-imbibing throng of men come to witness a hanging. No way would such an important participant in an expected ceremony be allowed to off himself in private in advance. When a condemned man was reprieved at the last moment, as indeed sometimes happened, this might incite the disappointed throng to riot, for although we have few records for such items as the shroud and the death watch, we know that this sort of riot is actually what did result from a reprieve in Pembroke MA in this year.6

The lenience of Harvard President Reverend John T. Kirkland had been succeeded by the strictness of President Josiah Quincy, Sr., the former mayor who was attempting to deal with student rebellion as he had once dealt with mobs attempting to tear down Boston’s whorehouses: by repression. Students at Harvard were rioting over living conditions and the entire Sophomore class was being not merely expelled but hauled before a court.

6. In this year Pennsylvania became the first state to move executions away from the public eye and carry them out only within prison enclosures. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Records of faculty meetings from this period show that in the shifting minority of professors who opposed and attempted to moderate Quincy’s crackdowns, Professor Charles Follen was alone in constancy of opposition.7 Freshman David Henry Thoreau evidently made himself scarce during the tearing of shutters off windows and the building of bonfires in front of doorways and his only contribution to the rebellion was a comment he appears to have made in Dr. Beck’s examination room –apparently sarcastically– “Our offense was rank.”8

(shutters awaiting the arrival of students)

One midnight during the great Harvard Rebellion Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar lay on his back in the belfry of Harvard Hall and sawed off the tongue of the bell that summoned the students to morning chapel. Fortunately he was not caught destroying property, or perhaps later he would not have been able to become Attorney

7. Professor Karl Follen’s brother Paul Follen was at this point emigrating to the United States, and would settle in Missouri. We’ll allow you three guesses as to what is about to happen to Professor Follen himself. 8. At Harvard at this time, the offense of “grouping” in Harvard Yard, that is, students assembling for some purpose not condoned by the faculty (such as, for instance, free speech), was grounds for being asked to “take up one’s connexions,” that is, grounds for permanent expulsion from college. (Such rules are of course not limited to the Harvard of the 19th Century: my own memories are of smelling tear gas on the steps of Widener Library as I came away from my carrel and found out that there had been a “Pogo Riot” in which the police had rioted and cleared the intersection in front of the student bookstore of passersby in 1960-1961, and then of being vomit gassed by US Marine guards on the street outside our embassy in Tehran, Iran in 1978 for the offense of attempting to obtain entry thereto as a US citizen in an Iran in which soldiers were authorized to kill anyone “assembling” in any public place in a group larger than two persons.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

General of the United States of America:

Of his college life little remains to say. In his Junior and Senior years he attracted the attention of Edward Tyrrell Channing, then the valued Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and received the highest marks for English Composition. He also won the second Bowdoin prize for an essay, and at the Exhibition in his Senior year had, as his part, the English oration, taking as his subject “Reverence.” His part at Commencement when he graduated was an English oration on “The Christian Philosophy; its Political Application.” Only fifty-two of his class received degrees at Commencement [80 had entered this class of 1835, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. had been forced to drop out on account of his eyes], largely a result of the “Rebellion,” but five more were allowed their Bachelor’s degree years later. Rockwood Hoar was third scholar. The refined and attractive Harrison Gray Otis Blake of Worcester, later Thoreau’s near friend, was chosen Orator by a large majority, but his modesty made him decline, and Charles C. Shackford, later a minister, and a professor at Cornell University, was then chosen. Blake, however, gave the Latin Salutatory. Benjamin Davis Winslow was the Poet. Hoar was chosen a member of the Class Committee.

It need only be added to this, that the student who was first scholar in the Harvard College class of 1835, a class that included Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and who was chosen to replace H.G.O. Blake, who was that class’s fourth scholar, as the class Orator, Charles Chauncy Shackford, after graduation went out to Concord and became a schoolteacher and romanced the local lasses, before going on to study law, and becoming a minister in 1841, and eventually becoming a professor at Cornell University. At Cornell, he would be their professor of rhetoric and literature, and, incidentally, would make himself one of the pioneers in the field now known as Comparative Literature. COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

The 2d volume, on water birds, of Professor Thomas Nuttall’s A MANUAL OF THE ORNITHOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF CANADA (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray). He resigned as curator of the Botanical Garden of Harvard in order to accompany the Wyeth Expedition to the Pacific coast. NUTTALL’S WATER BIRDS

Horatio Cook Meriam received his A.M. degree from Harvard College: Horatio Cook Meriam; LL.B. 1831; A.M. 1834 1872

NEW “HARVARD MEN”

James Russell Lowell matriculated at Harvard.

The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard began the long-term task of editing a 10-volume series (Boston: Hilliard, Gray; London: Kennett) –and then a 15-volume series– of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY.

LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. I HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1838

During this year Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College got married with Mary Whitney, who had been born on May 5, 1815 to Asa Whitney and Mary Whitney (she would die on April 12, 1845 at the age of 30, after producing two daughters, Mary S. on April 30, 1839 and Julia W. on August 24, 1842).9

A group of undergraduates had in September 1835 begun to publish a magazine of their own writings and would continue this effort until June 1838. The undergraduate David Henry Thoreau had taken no part in such activity. At this point the group reissued the accumulating materials as a 3d book volume:10 HARVARDIANA, VOL. IV

Volume IX of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. IX

This volume encompassed three contributions:

•LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN by the Reverend Francis Bowen LIFE OF BARON STEUBEN

•LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT by Charles Haywood, Jr. LIFE OF SEBASTIAN CABOT

•LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON by Professor Cornelius Conway Felton LIFE OF WILLIAM EATON

9. According to a genealogy of the Felton family: “Some of the newspapers said in speaking of the wealth of the literary men of Cambridge, that Prof. Felton had been equally fortunate in his matrimonial connections in regard to wealth with the other professors, viz: Everett, Palfrey, Longfellow, Lowell and Norton, by marrying fortunes in expectancy or possession.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

April 7, Saturday: A few days after his lecture at the Concord Lyceum, Jones Very showed up again, unexpectedly,

10. There would be three such volumes, labeled Volume I, Volume II, and Volume IV. There does not seem to have been a Volume III published in this book form (apparently it was produced only in monthly magazine form) and no electronic text as yet exists, for the Volume I that had been published. The editorial board for this final volume consisted of Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt, Charles Woodman Scates, James Russell Lowell, and Nathan Hale, Jr., and they worked out of student room #27 at Massachusetts Hall. The illustration that they used on the cover page of their magazine was of University Hall: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

along with several other Harvard students, in the company of the Professor Cornelius Conway Felton who had

taught Sophocles, Euripides, and Homer during Thoreau’s sophomore and junior years at Harvard College. Waldo Emerson promptly sent out messengers and succeeded in attracting Henry Thoreau, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar,11 and the Reverend Barzillai Frost to help him entertain these visitors.

11. Are we quite certain this was Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar rather than his nephew Rockwood Hoar, son of George Frisbie Hoar? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1840

George Henry Bode’s HISTORY OF GREEK POETRY was reviewed by Professor Cornelius Conway Felton in the North American Review.

C.C. FELTON ON BODE

During this year Professor Felton completed his translation of Wolfgang Menzel’s 3-volume GERMAN LITERATURE and it appeared as part of the Reverend George Ripley’s SPECIMENS OF FOREIGN LITERATURE.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

July: Early in this month Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened, in the front parlor of the building she had leased at 13 West Street in Boston, her Foreign Library, a bookstore and circulating library.12

At the suggestion of Washington Allston she would stock imported art supplies. One section was allocated to the homeopathic nostrums created by her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. She displayed on the walls the paintings her sister Sophia was offering for sale. Margaret Fuller had staged her “conversations” here in late 1839 and this would continue in the early 1840s. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would stop by to read the newspaper. Sophia would marry Nathaniel Hawthorne at West Street in 1842. The editors of and contributors to THE DIAL would meet there, and for a time in 1842 and 1843 she would publish this journal as well as writing for it (her “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” a piece about Brook Farm, would appear in the October 1841 issue, and her “Fourierism” would appear in the April 1844 issue). I had ... a foreign library of new French and German books, and then I came into contact with the world as never before. The Ripleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours. Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these things were discussed in my book-store by Boston lawyers and Cambridge professors. Those were very living years for me.

12. Circulating libraries were privately owned collections of books and periodicals lent out for profit at fixed rates; this institution had its heyday in America in the first half of the 19th Century, just prior to the rise of the public library movement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

In this year Miss Peabody issued the first of two printed catalogs of her book collection.13 The collection included such titles as Wolfgang Menzel’s GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG 14 MENZEL. BY C.C. FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840), Miss Peabody’s edition of Anna Cabot Lowell’s THEORY OF TEACHING, Lamartine’s HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS and TRAVELS IN THE EAST, Michelet’s MÉMOIRES DE LUTHER, Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the Reverend Ripley’s LETTERS ON THE LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY (a response to Andrews Norton’s attack on Transcendentalism), Robespierre’s MÉMOIRES, and Rosini’s LUISA STROZZI, in addition to classic works by Æschylus, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, George Bancroft, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Miguel de Cervantes, the Reverend Channing, Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cousin, Dante, Dumas, Euripides, Gerando, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hesiod, Homer, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Molière, Petrarch, Plato, Racine, Richter, Rousseau, George Sand, Schiller, Schlegel, William Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, Volt aire, William Wordsworth, and Xenophon. The collection also included various periodicals such as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Boston Quarterly Review, THE DIAL, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung, the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, the Musical Journal, the New-York Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Western Messenger.

13. A facsimile of this catalog still exists, as part of Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12. 14. Henry Thoreau would consult this volume on December 5, 1840. His extracts would consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

December 5, Saturday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26 Cong. 2 sess. I. No. 2, pp. 405, 450.

Henry Thoreau read in Wolfgang Menzel’s GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG MENZEL. BY C.C. FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840; this was Volumes 7-9 of the Reverend George Ripley’s SPECIMENS OF FOREIGN STANDARD LITERATURE, a 9-volume edition that had been being put through the presses at Hilliard, Gray since 1838). His extracts consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1841

Henry Jacob Bigelow, who had been a classmate of David Henry Thoreau until being dismissed on April 24, 1837 for having been in possession of firearms and ammunition in his dorm room and repeatedly discharging a firearm inside that room (MH-Ar Faculty Records UAIII 5.5.2.IX, 311), had completed his studies at Dartmouth College. He was granted the degree of M.D. at Harvard College.

After graduating at Harvard 2d in his class, the impoverished Charles Stearns Wheeler had needed to stay on for a salary. In September 1838, following the “nervous collapse” of Jones Very, he had taken over as Greek tutor under Professor of Greek Literature Cornelius Conway Felton, and in January 1839 he added to this the duties of instructor in history under Professor of Ancient and Modern History Jared Sparks. As a member of the Parietal Committee (a permanent standing committee made up of proctors and officers of instruction who resided within the college walls, or in buildings over which the college had superintendence), Wheeler had some difficulties in managing the students; for instance they broke out the windows of his room. He would come to regard this task of disciplining the general student rowdiness as incompatible with teaching, and eventually he would urge Harvard President Josiah Quincy, Sr. to implement a number of reforms, including eliminating mandatory worship, elevating the study of English literature, and loosening the disciplinary code.

In his “autobiography,” John Shepard Keyes would reminisce about a “Harvard rebellion” created by an attempt by Wheeler to discipline a student, Simmons — from which he had been rescued in the nick of time by his family, which rescue had enabled him to avoid detection and continue as a “student” to his graduation: But all this was lame to what was coming an old friend of mine Stearns Wheeler of Lincoln who had fitted for college in the Concord Academy, and a thoroughly good but obstinate fellow was Greek tutor and chairman of the Parietal Committee. His room in the east end of Holworthy was the place of their meeting, and they looked after the discipline of the students. Wheeler was conscientious and some small escapades of a set of our class coming to his knowledge, he set out to catch them, and in so doing had a personal collision with Simmons on the Delta I think, spying on him For this Simmons was expelled, and his set of fellows severely punished in other ways. The class took it up and bore Simmons off in a barouch and four white horses after prayers at night, with half a dozen of the best scholars as his companions in open defiance of the authorities— That night the college was in an uproar and all rules were openly violated in the yard and buildings. The Parietal met in Wheelers room and occasionally sallied out to stop some disturbances My sober and sedate chum, one of the first eight in scholarship got greatly excited and vowed to lock them into their room when they returned to their session Watching from our window we saw them go back in squads to Hy 20 in the east entry stealing up the stairs Farnsworth quietly turned the key in the lock of the door and he thought he had them fast, but the door was ajar, and they sprang after him. He rushed up stairs hoping to find an open room or an escape but none offered and in the fourth story there was only the open window of the entry. Desperate but bold the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

got out of the window and held on to the ledge by his hands. Not seeing him his pursuers returned for a light to make a closer search, when he kicked his feet through the sash of the 3d story window and with this support he climbed back into the entry. The noise of the breaking glass drew the Parietals out into the yard in a pursuit of the stone throwers, and my chum walked coolly down by them and up to our room unsuspected— It was a feat of nerve and strength few collegians then would have dared and it made him quite a hero for the nonce. That night a meeting of the class was called for the next morning under the Rebellion tree, and with no debate and but little noise and great firmness we decided to attend no exercises until Simmons was returned, the others let up and Wheeler dismissed, and sent it as our ultimatum to the faculty. Every member with the exception of Higginson signed the paper, and we sent it to the President by a committee. The faculty met and refused it, and threatened— But the other classes joined with us and for several days the college was in full Rebellion, no prayers, no recitations, no anything — but gatherings in the yard cheers of defiance, groans for any officer seen in the yard, and general rowdiness. How it ended I never exactly knew for ‘Uncle David’ Jr. going home from Cambridge and stopping to leave my washing that he alway carried, gave such a wildly exciting account of matters there, that Father started in the moonlight and drove to Cambridge to bring me home. Arrived after midnight a knocking at my door though it waked me yet as I thought it some fellow wanting me for some deviltry I slept on tired with the excitement of the day while poor Father finding the college all quiet was forced to try Willards who wasnt easy to rouse up after he had retired at the call of belated students, and I am inclined to the belief kept the old gentleman cooling his wrath and his heels all night— Any way he knocked again before sunrise and after finding Farnsworth, and I quietly abed, and very cool and unexcited over the Rebellion insisted on carrying me home to keep me out of mischief, and as that avoided examinations if there were any I unwillingly consented, and we drove home to a late breakfast. Thus I got an additional vacation of a week or more while the Rebellion simmered down & at last petered out. So after a good time at home I came back to hear my name read out among those having parts at commencement, my first last and only college honor. The class graduated forty four in number, and twenty three or one more than half had parts assigned them Mine was a dis something sertation or quisition I dont remember which with two other fellows Minot and [in pencil, possibly in another hand: Rice] subject Rome Athens & Jerusalem. I was utterly astonished, and so was everbody else, none more so than Father who feared much I should lose my degree. The only way I could ever account for it was that the theme I mentioned carried my marks higher than Minots and as he must have a part, I couldnt be left out of one. Any way I got it, wrote it in the 6 weeks before vacation that the senior class then had without lessons for the purpose, and enjoyed those weeks too in many ways till HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Class Day came. Ours was a failure. Orne the orator was drunk over night and the oration a muddle with out sense or declamation in which he excelled. The poem I dont remember, and the spreads few and poor. The dancing on the green I had anticipated as so many of my lady friends were to be there but it didnt go off well, and the cheering and tree were unenthusiastic. The class supper at the Maverick House East Boston was the best part. Farnsworth and I drove over sat it out and got back at sunrise!! I packed my trunk, said goodbye to my room and college and without a regret left for home in the mail stage that stopped at the same gate as I entered at, and landed me in Concord to breakfast How some trifling incidents cling to the memory I can see that morning and the yard and room as distinctly now after more than forty years while all else even of these recollections are blurred and hazy as was the morning I left home to enter. Why this is thus who can say? J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1843

Thomas Wentworth Higginson entered Harvard College’s graduate school for his ministerial training. During this year he was seeing his name in print as the author of four published poems plus a review of Lydia Maria Child’s LETTERS FROM NEW YORK.

Professors Barnas Sears, Bela Bates Edwards, and Cornelius Conway Felton prepared a collection of original and translated selections for publication by Gould, Kendall and Lincoln of 59 Washington Street, Boston, CLASSICAL STUDIES: ESSAYS ON ANCIENT LITERATURE AND ART. WITH THE BIOGRAPHY AND CORRESPONDENCE OF EMINENT PHILOLOGISTS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1844

Edward Sherman Hoar and George Merrick Brooks of Concord graduated from Harvard College with the class of 1844, as did the Richard Frederick Fuller whom Henry Thoreau had been tutoring during their “walk to Wachusett.” RICHARD FREDERICK FULLER was the fourth son. He graduated at Harvard University, 1844, studied law in Greenfield, Mass., afterwards a year at the Harvard Law School, and, having completed his studies in the office of his uncle, Henry H. Fuller, Esq., in Boston, was admitted to the bar on examination in open court, December, 1846, at the age of twenty-two. He became, and continued for two years to be, the law partner of his uncle, and subsequently practised law with success in Boston. Having been fitted for college, at the age of sixteen he entered a store in Boston, at the solicitation of his family; but mercantile life proving distasteful to him, be relinquished it at the end of one year. By severe application, he in six months made up for this lost year, at the same time keeping pace with the studies of the Sophomore class, and was admitted to college in the middle of the Sophomore year. He graduated the second or third scholar of his class. He died at his country home in Wayland, May 30, 1869. He had a taste for literature, was deeply religious, and an ardent lover of nature. One of his greatest pleasures was to walk in the early morning through woods and fields accompanied by his children. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Eddie would study law for a year in the Dane Law School, then for a couple of years in New-York — and in 1848 would be admitted to practice in the courts of New York.

Benjamin Apthorp Gould graduated (he had studied mathematics and the physical sciences under Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics Benjamin Peirce).

Augustus Goddard Peabody graduated from the Harvard Medical School.

Professor of Greek Literature Cornelius Conway Felton prepared an English translation of Eduard Munk’s 1834 DIE METRIK DER GRIECHEN UND RÖMER, as METRES OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS.

1846

September 28, Monday: Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College, a widower, remarried with Mary Louisa Cary, a daughter of Hon. Thomas G. Cary and Mary Perkins Cary of Boston. According to a genealogy of the Felton family: “Some of the newspapers said in speaking of the wealth of the literary men of Cambridge, that Prof. Felton had been equally fortunate in his matrimonial connections in regard to wealth with the other professors, viz: Everett, Palfrey, Longfellow, Lowell and Norton, by marrying fortunes in expectancy or possession.” Besides becoming the step-mother to the two existing children Mary S. Felton, age 7, and Julia W. Felton, age 4, this new wife would produce Louisa C. Felton on March 16, 1849, Cornelius Conway Felton, Jr. on December 2, 1851, and Thomas C. Felton on September 15, 1855. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1849

John Shepard Keyes took a seat in the Massachusetts Senate, and as such, chanced into a priceless opportunity to revisit his alma mater, and enjoy his old “proffessors” as they squirmed under his newfound and entirely undeserved privilege. The Legislature met in Jan’y 1849 and the vacancies in the Senate were filled up with Whigs at once. I remember that we had invited a large party of young and old that night and had a pleasant time when Esq Barrett then state treasurer came in bringing me notice of my election, and adding to the eclat of the occasion what had not been anticipated. I with the others took our seats the next day in that respectable body, and think I was younger than any one before or almost since At any rate I was a mere boy and among forty Whig senators in a very poor place. As the youngest I had the lowest seat with D.C. Baker of Lynn across the aisle he being next me in age, and we formed a lasting friendship. I was put on the Military Com. from my rank I suppose as first lieut to which I had risen, and on the Committee on Education. It was not a very distinguished Senate, but it had some very good fellows in it, and the House had more. I took with the rest a room at the Revere House, attended faithfully to my duties, had some sharp fights in the Committee on Education over incorporating a Catholic College for one and came to know C.W. Upham of Salem the chairman, J Lothrop Motley and Erastus Hopkins of Northampton house members of it very well. Besides the Middlesex lawyers, Lord of Salem Dawes of Pittsfield, Train of Framingham Devins of Greenfield and Bullock of Worcester were in the Legislature and we made a club at the Revere having a parlor, that had much work fun and politics well mixed with hot whiskey for the winter nights. I had but one hobby to fight the Fitchburg R.R. and in this I failed I had some prominence early in the session for Esquire Joe the State Treasurer died suddenly and as his townsman to make the announcement and arrange a legislative com funeral at Concord for him, which was duly attended. I made but little talk as was proper for so young a senator, but I knew everybody of prominence in politics and worked for certain friends in the disposal of the offices that came with the change of administration. I had rather assumed my fathers place in the county, and as I believed owed my early election to the knowledge the county had of him than to my merits. Indeed our names being so nearly alike many people voted for me thinking it him. We put Devins in as U.S. Marshal, P. Greely as Collector and N.W. Coffin as Navy Agent, and divided the spoils as best we could. Of course Danil Webster Abbott Lawrence and R.C. Winthrop and such magnates really decided these matters, but as we boys had done the work of the campaign, and been well patted on the shoulder by them while engaged in it, we were still pleasantly allowed to do something about the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

selection of officers. It made a busy exciting winter. I usually staid in Boston 3 or 4 nights in a week, and this with attending court at Cambridge where I had some business kept me at work. I recall but little of interest in the legislation of the year, and in the Senate with no opposition we had to be very gingerly about treading on each others toes. I would far rather have been in the House where there was more freedom and interest. The session ended however in a funny incident worth telling I had of course been put on as one of the senatorial overseers of Harvard College, and the exhibition coming the last day of the session when I didnt care to be in my seat for some reason I have forgotten I determined therefore to attend the Cambridge exercises and see how the college was getting on It didnt occur to me that on the last day neither governor nor any of the dignitaries would be able to get away from the Legislature till on arriving I found myself the only member of the board present to examine the college. I had kept somewhat up with college having attended commencement mainly to see our class meetings, while Brooks & Ned. Hoar in 45 Friz Hoar G Bartlett, G Heywood had kept up the Concord line of graduates. My brother Joe had entered and thanks to Everetts folly and his own had a chequered course, and got rusticated for a year at Lunenburg with Babcock! His class finished this year and gave me an additional reason for examining the college. Snuffy old Sparks was the President, Everett having resigned, and on reaching University Hall I found the faculty I used so to dread in solemn waiting for the committee!!! Informing them of the reason why no others would probably attend, they began their reports of the condition of their several departments To those proffessors who used to dead me so often I put questions and comments in their own style and wasn’t it nuts to me not seven years out of their clutches to get them into mine old Channing, Beck, and Benny Pierce caught a cross examination, they little imagined & I chuckled mightily over their squirming— soberly pocketing their written reports and gravely informing them I would make my report on the state of the University to the full committee, I led the way to the chapel on the arm of the President and sitting in the seat of honor, heard the exhibition parts, and gravely pencilling notes on my programme, I watched the boys and girls out of the corner of my eye, and hugely enjoyed the queer change of a few short years. I think it was one of the most complete revenges of times whirligig I ever met! As we started off in state again J.T. Austin ex Attorney Genl. arrived and after conferring with me, helped to eat the dinner in Commons Hall, but well served, and relieved me of the reports and the response in behalf of the overseers.! J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Joseph Boyden Keyes of Concord, another son of John Keyes, graduated from Harvard College (and would become a lawyer).

Charles Louis Flint graduated from Harvard. Although he had not planned to teach, just prior to graduation he receive an offer from a grammar school. NEW “HARVARD MEN”

Harvard Professor of Greek Literature Cornelius Conway Felton prepared an English-language edition of Professor Arnold Henri Guyot’s lectures, as EARTH AND MAN, LECTURES ON COMPARATIVE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN ITS RELATION TO THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.

THE EARTH AND MAN, 1849 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1851

The 2d part of John Wells Foster’s survey findings authorized for publication by the federal Congress, REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY AND TOPOGRAPHY OF A PORTION OF THE LAKE SUPERIOR LAND DISTRICT IN THE STATE OF MICHIGAN: PART TWO, THE IRON REGION. LAKE SUPERIOR REPORT, II

At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Cincinnati, Professor Louis Agassiz would rise from his seat to pronounce this to be “one of the grandest generalizations ever made in American geology.” THE SCIENCE OF 1851

A copy of this report by Foster would be discovered in the personal library of Henry Thoreau.

Arnold Henri Guyot’s THE EARTH AND MAN: LECTURES ON COMPARATIVE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, IN ITS 15 RELATION TO THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. TRANS. C.C. FELTON, 3RD ED., REV. (Boston: Gould & Lincoln). THE EARTH AND MAN, 1849 THE EARTH AND MAN, 1853

This would be in the library of Waldo Emerson and would be referred to by Thoreau in CAPE COD.

CAPE COD: I have been surprised to discover from a steamer the PEOPLE OF shallowness of Massachusetts Bay itself. Off Billingsgate Point CAPE COD I could have touched the bottom with a pole, and I plainly saw it variously shaded with sea-weed, at five or six miles from the shore. This is “The Shoal-ground of the Cape,” it is true, but elsewhere the Bay is not much deeper than a country pond. We are told that the deepest water in the English Channel between Shakespeare’s Cliff and Cape Grinez, in France, is one hundred and eighty feet; and Guyot says that “the Baltic Sea has a depth of only one hundred and twenty feet between the coasts of Germany and those of Sweden,” and “the Adriatic between Venice and Trieste has a depth of only one hundred and thirty feet.” A pond in my native town, only half a mile long, is more than one hundred feet deep.

ARNOLD HENRI GUYOT In addition Thoreau quoted from this volume at several points in his “Canadian Notebook.”

15. Unfortunately, it will be the 1st Edition, published in 1849, and the 7th Edition, published in 1853, rather than this 3d Edition, published in 1851, which I must display for your electronic access here — Google Books hasn’t yet made this 3d Edition, as accessed by Thoreau and Emerson, available. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Winter: Lecture Season of ’51/52 at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

13th Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Orville Dewey, D.D. Natural Religion. “Problem of Human Destiny” 12 lectures Professor Cornelius Conway Felton, LL.D. Greek Poetry 12 lectures B.A. Gould, Jr., Ph.D. The Progress of Astronomy in the last Half-century 12 lectures Reverend Professor Francis Bowen, A.M. Origin and Development of the English and Am. Constitutions 12 lectures

At the Concord Lyceum, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson delivered “Mohammed.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1852

Arthur Hugh Clough became a tutor at Harvard College.

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton prepared a selection from the writings of the Reverend Professor John Snelling Popkin, who had preceded him as Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard, with a memoir. JOHN SNELLING POPKIN, D.D.

Charles Louis Flint left the Dane Law School of Harvard to accept an offer in a law office in New-York. Soon afterward he would be admitted to the bar. In this same year, with the organization of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture as a department of the state government, he would be appointed to be its secretary.

Winter: I have a note to the effect that one morning Bill Wheeler, the Concord town drunk, was found frozen. (I am, however, unable to find anything about anything like this in any Wheeler family genealogy, so perhaps this report is entirely without substance.)

The lecture season of ’52/53, in the Odeon Hall of Boston, amounted to the following:

14th Season of The Lowell Institute Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. Geology, etc. 12 lectures Charles Bishop Goodrich, Esq. Science of Government, etc. 12 lectures Right Reverend Alonzo Potter, D.D. Natural Religion 12 lectures Professor C.C. Felton. Life of Greece 12 lectures Doctor O.W. Holmes. English Poetry of the 19th Century 12 lectures

At the Concord Lyceum, Elizabeth Oakes Smith delivered “Womanhood.”

At the Concord Lyceum, Ellery Channing lectured on “Society.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1853

The long-term Harvard College language instructor Francis Sales wrote an autobiographical sketch that is now filed in Box HUG1763 at Harvard Library.

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton’s “Life of William Eaton” in the Reverend Jared Sparks’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (New York: Harper & Brothers).

In this year the Reverend Sparks resigned and James Walker became president of Harvard. Although he would experiment with a new idea, that of offering elective courses, he would revert to Harvard’s traditional fixed curriculum.

NEW “HARVARD MEN” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

This is what Harvard would look like during his administration:

April: Cornelius Conway Felton sailed from Boston harbor, on a tour of Europe that would continue until March 1854. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1854

March: Cornelius Conway Felton arrived back in Boston from his European tour. His letters written during this trip eventually would be published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1855

Professor of Greek Literature Cornelius Conway Felton prepared a new American edition of Sir William Smith, LL.D’s 1854 A HISTORY OF GREECE: FROM EARLIEST TIMES TO THE ROMAN CONQUEST; WITH SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS ON THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE AND ART.

Charles Sanders Peirce graduated at Dixwell’s and entered Harvard College. NEW “HARVARD MEN”

He was reading Friedrich Schiller’s AESTHETIC LETTERS and beginning a study of Immanuel Kant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

Charles Sanders Peirce was a sophomore at Harvard College when, he would later allege, he decided to abandon the idea of becoming a fast man and undertook the pursuit of pleasure.

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton’s SELECTIONS FROM MODERN GREEK WRITERS.

Nehemiah Ball of Concord, son of Nehemiah Ball of Concord, a transfer from Bowdoin College, having been brilliant but erratic in the course of his studies at Harvard, failed to graduate with his Class of 1856 (he would receive his diploma “out of course” in the following year). NEW “HARVARD MEN”

May 14, Wednesday: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to Thomas Gold Appleton, his brother-in-law, in Paris (Appleton happens to have been the Boston wit who originated the famous comment “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris”) that “We have formed a Dinner Club, once a month, at Parker’s. Agassiz, Motley, Emerson, Peirce, Lowell, Whipple, Sam Ward, Holmes, Dwight, Woodman, myself, and yourself. We sit from three o’clock till nine, generally, which proves it to be very pleasant.”16

May 14. Air full of golden robins. Their loud clear note betrays them as soon as they arrive. Yesterday and to-clay I see half a dozen tortoises on a rail, — their first appearance in numbers. Catbird amid shrub oaks. Female red-wing [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus]. Flood tells me he saw cherry-birds am the 12th of April in Monroe’s garden.

16. Longfellow overlooked to mention that Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and Corne- lius Conway Felton would soon join. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

Charles Sanders Peirce was a senior at Harvard College when, he would say, he gave up enjoying life, exclaiming “Vanity of vanities!” NEW “HARVARD MEN”

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton again took a sabbatical in Europe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

The Reverend Grindall Reynolds, minister of the 1st Parish Church in Concord, received Harvard College’s honorary Master of Arts degree. NEW “HARVARD MEN”

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton, back from his 2d sabbatical in Europe, succeeded the Reverend James Walker, D.D. as President of Harvard. To J.W. Set not thy foot on graves; Hear what wine and roses say; The mountain chase, the summer waves, The crowded town, thy feet may well delay. Set not thy foot on graves; Nor seek to unwind the shroud Which charitable Time And Nature have allowed To wrap the errors of a sage sublime. Set not thy foot on graves; Care not to strip the dead Of his sad ornament, His myrrh, and wine, and rings. His sheet of lead, And trophies buried: Go, get them where he earned them when alive; As resolutely dig or dive. Life is too short to waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'T will soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark! — Waldo Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1862

February 26, Wednesday: Cornelius Conway Felton died of enlargement of the heart at the age of 54 in the home of his younger brother at Chester, Pennsylvania. According to a genealogy of the Felton family, “The announcement of his death was received with general regret throughout the country.”

After its anti-slavery patrol with the US African Squadron, it was decided, the USS Constellation would be serving for two or three years in the Mediterranean, protecting US merchant shipping there from the activities of Confederate raiders.

March 9, Sunday: The Reverend Andrew P. Peabody, preacher to Harvard College, delivered a remembrance in the Appleton Chapel of their recently departed President Cornelius Conway Felton: In the estimate of our late President’s claims on our grateful remembrance, we cannot forget how large and unique a place he filled in the world of letters. Few men have attained so high a position in one department, with so generous a culture in all. While he was unsurpassed in the language and literature to which his labors were given for so many years, it was impossible to point out his deficiencies in any branch of learning.17

17. “You can tell a Harvard man, although not very much.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The fighting at Hampton Roads continued into another day.

In an attempt to reduce the North’s great naval advantage, Confederate engineers had converted a scuttled Union frigate, the U.S.S. Merrimac, into an iron-sided vessel rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia. On this date, in the first naval engagement between ironclad ships, the Monitor fought the Virginia to a draw, but not before the Virginia had sunk two wooden Union warships off Norfolk, Virginia. Here is Herman Melville’s “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”: Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His painted pomp, ’twould ill befit Overmuch to ply The rhyme’s barbaric cymbal. Hail to victory without the gaud Of glory; zeal that needs no fans Of banners; plain mechanic power Plied cogently in War now placed- Where War belongs- Among the trades and artisans. Yet this was battle, and intense- Beyond the strife of fleets heroic; Deadlier, closer, calm ’mid storm; No passion; all went on by crank, Pivot, and screw, And calculations of caloric. Needless to dwell; the story’s known. The ringing of those plates on plates Still ringeth round the world- The clangor of that blacksmith’s fray. The anvil-din Resounds this message from the Fates: War shall yet be, and to the end; But war-paint shows the streaks of weather; War shall yet be, but warriors Are now but operatives; War’s made Less grand than Peace, And a singe runs through lace and feather. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1864

Professor Cornelius Conway Felton’s posthumous FAMILIAR LETTERS FROM EUROPE, giving an account of his last grand tour of the continent (Boston).

Posthumous publication of Henry Thoreau’s THE MAINE WOODS, which called for the establishment of “national preserves” of virgin forest, “not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re- creation.” CONSERVATIONISM THE MAINE WOODS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1865

Elihu Burritt’s A WALK FROM LONDON TO LANDS’ END AND BACK, WITH NOTES BY THE WAY. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS (London: Sampson Low, & Marston).

FAMILIAR LETTERS FROM EUROPE put in sequence the various missives written by Cornelius Conway Felton between April 1853 and March 1854, during his great adventure in tourism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1867

After the American Civil War James Russell Lowell’s essays devoted to Unionism, written for The Atlantic Monthly, were reissued as a book entitled MELIBŒUS-HIPPONAX. THE BIGLOW PAPERS. SECOND SERIES. MELIBŒUS-HIPPONAX

Publication in Boston in two volumes of 49 lectures that Professor Cornelius Conway Felton of Harvard College had delivered before The Lowell Institute, as GREECE, ANCIENT AND MODERN. NEW “HARVARD MEN” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1876

It was during this year that this most pleasant photo-op of the series of five still most impressive Harvard College HNICs was created:18

(Mr. Felton had expired in 1862, Mr. Quincy in 1864, Mr. Everett in 1865, Mr. Sparks in 1866, Mr. Walker in 1874 — it would appear from this information that for purposes of PhotoShop they had not been seated in the order of their deaths.)

18. By the way: Then as now, Harvard has been the College of Presidents. Then it was the college which had attempted education upon two Presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, whereas in our later timeframe it would be the college which attempted education upon a brace of President Roosevelts (it would be left to Yale to perpetrate a brace of Bushs). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

1943

March: Edgeley Woodman Todd’s “Philosophical Ideas at Harvard College, 1817-1837” ABERCROMBIE (The New England Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 63-90). JOHN LOCKE EDGELY WOODMAN TODD DUG. STEWART THOS. BROWN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

2006

February 26, Sunday: A column in the New York Times mentioned the Harvard presidents of Henry Thoreau’s era and quoted Henry, who had as a student been in what today we might term Harvard University’s “comp-lit” concentration: How the Liberal Arts Got That Way By MATTHEW PEARL BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor, but oddly also laid the seeds of his presidential breakdown. From 1846 to 1868, Harvard had five consecutive presidents whose short-lived and frustrated tenures evoke Mr. Summers’s five-year stint. The era, like our own, was one of strong discord over the central purpose of a university. Then, the controlling movement was a reaction against the liberal flowering of the 1830s that had briefly expanded the fields of study offered and the freedoms of students to enjoy them; today’s melees concern, among other lesser disputes, the distribution of money and attention among the many divergently interested departments of the university. Until the 1860s, Harvard presidents were anointed by and answered to the university’s Board of Overseers, a powerful group of political and religious establishment figures that included the governor of Massachusetts, along with other dignitaries appointed by the Legislature. But in 1865 the Legislature passed a law democratizing things, allowing Harvard alumni to elect the overseers, in an effort said to “emancipate” Harvard (a loaded term in 1865) from politics, and render it an independent rather than state institution. In the years leading up to this transition, the Harvard presidents fought against the tide of liberalism, limiting the number of disciplines that could be taught and, within those disciplines, maneuvering student choices toward rigidly designed classical studies. When Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked to Henry David Thoreau that all branches of learning were taught at Harvard, Thoreau recalled of his own time there that, yes, “all the branches, but none of the roots.” Students were insulated, reprimanded for congregating in groups, raising their voices and even “throwing reflections of sunshine around the College Yard.” All five of the transitory line of pre-1865 presidents –Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, James Walker, Cornelius Conway Felton and HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Thomas Hill– had been Harvard students themselves, and all but one were clergymen. They fought in the humanities against the expansion of teaching foreign languages, and in the sciences against the spread of Darwinism, which was seen as antireligious.

Harvard students not only pushed back against the institutional emphasis on recitations, the prevailing pedagogical method of memorization and repetition, but also pushed the culture on campus outward and into the larger world. When the Civil War broke out, Harvard students volunteered to fight in surprisingly large numbers. President Felton, whose death by illness made his tenure less than two years, is said to have deducted points from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s grades when Holmes enlisted in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Army. He was also said to have taken the time to write a letter to another president –Abraham Lincoln– during the height of the war, to inform him that Robert Todd Lincoln, then a Harvard student, had been caught smoking. The 1865 law shaking up the Board of Overseers allowed the university to adjust more nimbly to events outside its gates. But the biggest result, four years later, was the selection of the next president, the chemist Charles William Eliot, who ushered in large-scale reforms that marked the renaissance in liberal arts education, not just at Harvard but also across the country. Eliot, only 35 at the time of his inauguration, published a two- part series on “The New Education” in The Atlantic Monthly, setting forth a national agenda for educational reform. The presidents of colleges like Cornell and Johns Hopkins were compelled to coordinate their efforts with Harvard’s. Appropriately, Eliot remained president for 40 years, the longest term in the university’s history, and brought Harvard into the first years of the 20th century. In a long-gestating paradox, however, the very changes that freed Eliot to renovate Harvard with a more independent and egalitarian framework also did in Larry Summers by leaving Harvard presidents without an identifiable constituency or a body to which, in the end, he may be said to answer. The president could no longer concentrate on pleasing the finite body of individuals who approved and could censure him. From Eliot’s term onward, each president had to be acutely aware of negotiating between competing and in many cases incompatible demands from the various factions — the administrative governing boards, the faculty, the students, the alumni, the donors and those holding the federal purse strings. When Larry Summers, through a series of perceived missteps and affronts, lost the support of the most vocal part of the faculty, the Harvard Corporation could not really have saved him even if it wanted to, because it was no longer clear who was in charge. The Harvard experience had long ago been liberated from politics in its most concrete attachment –that tie to the Massachusetts Legislature– but it has been politicized in a different way, subjected to the realm of public politics and opinion. By removing the president’s identifiable overseers (in name and role), the president himself was divested of concentrated power because any or all pressure groups could cause problems for him. There had been a time –1829, to be precise– when Josiah Quincy had been able to shift seamlessly between being the mayor of Boston and the president of Harvard, and Everett had been governor before taking office in Harvard Yard. Today the Harvard president, in a way, has a much broader constituency than any mayor or governor, but also a blurrier one. Harvard, as our dominant university, has become a stand-in for the national education culture, and the Harvard president has become everyone’s college president. So, if the culmination of events at Harvard in 1865 was a factor HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

in reshaping higher education in America for the last 140 years, will we see a similar impact from the Summers affair? I suspect that this time it will be mostly for Harvard alone. The melodrama of the Summers affair has made for a great news story, as does the assumption that any action at Harvard carries a national influence. But overexcited observers on both sides will find few substantive ripples outside Harvard Yard. True, it might make a few other college presidents a bit warier of offending their faculties, or make them think twice before pressing for big changes quickly. But in the end, and in defiance of the overwhelming level of national news media attention all week, this incident may commemorate how America has outgrown Harvard. It is still our most prestigious brand; but as a Harvard alumnus, I find it especially obvious that today there are so many equally outstanding institutions, public as well as private, and such a huge proportion of the public is now college-educated, that Harvard no longer dictates the dominant model for the American university. The uproar of 1865 resulted in Harvard becoming more egalitarian and left nobody in charge — in a sense, American education has made a similar transition over the last century, no longer leaving Harvard with the necessity of being in control. This may also leave Harvard, finally, free to shape its modern identity on its own terms.

Matthew Pearl is the author of “The Dante Club” and the forthcoming novel “The Poe Shadow.”

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Prof. Cornelius Conway Felton HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: October 24, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: PROF. CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN