For the professorship in this department Professor Agassiz had recommended to me Dr. Burt Wilder; and I soon found him, as Agassiz had foretold, not only a thorough investigator, but an admirable teacher. His lectures were not read, but were, as regards phrasing, extemporaneous;and it seemed to me that, mingled with other studies, a course of lectures given in so good a style, by so gifted a man, could not fail to be of great use in teaching our students, incidentally, the best way of using the English language in communicating their ideas to their fellowmen.
I had long deplored the rhetorical fustian and oratorical tall-talk which so greatly afflict our country, and which had been, to a considerable extent, cultivated in our colleges and universities; I determined to try, at least, to substitute for it clean, clear, straightforward statement and illustration; and it seemed to me that a course of lectures on a subject which admitted neither fustian nor tall-talk, by a clear-headed, clear-voiced, earnest, and honest man, was the best thing in the world for this purpose.
So was adopted the plan of beginning most courses with an extended course of lectures upon human physiology, in which to real practice in investigation by the class is added the hearing of a first-rate lecturer.
As regards the course in literature, I determined that use should be made of this to promote the general culture of students, as had been done up to that time by very few of our American universities. At Yale in my day, there was never even a single lecture on any subject in literature, either ancient or modern: everything was done by means of ``recitations'' from text-books; and while young men read portions of masterpieces in Greek and Latin, their attention was hardly ever directed to these as literature. As regards the great fields of modern literature, nothing whatever was done. In the English literature and language, every man was left entirely to his own devices. One of the first professors I called to Cornell was Hiram Corson, who took charge of the department of English literature; and from that day to this he has been a center from which good culture has radiated among our students. Professor H. B. Sprague was also called;and he also did excellent work, though in a different way.
I also added non-resident professors. My original scheme I still think a good one. It was to call James Russell Lowell for early English literature, Bishop Arthur Cleveland Coxe for the literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Edwin Whipple for the literature of Queen Anne's time, and George William Curtis for recent and contemporary literature. Each of these men was admirable as a scholar and lecturer in the particular field named;but the restricted means of the university obliged me to cut the scheme down, so that it included simply Lowell for early and Curtis for recent literature. Other lectures in connection with the instruction of the resident professors marked an epoch, and did much to remove anything like Philistinism from the student body. Bayard Taylor's lectures in German literature thus supplemented admirably the excellent work of the resident professors Hewett and Horatio White. To remove still further any danger of Philistinism, I called an eminent graduate of Harvard,--Charles Chauncey Shackford,--whose general lectures in various fields of literature were attractive and useful. In all this I was mainly influenced by the desire to prevent the atmosphere of the university becoming simply and purely that of a scientific and technical school. Highly as I prized the scientific spirit and technical training, Ifelt that the frame of mind engendered by them should be modified by an acquaintance with the best literature as literature. There were many evidences that my theory was correct. Some of our best students in the technical departments developed great love for literary studies.
One of them attracted much attention by the literary excellence of his writings; and on my speaking to him about it, and saying that it seemed strange to me that a man devoted to engineering should show such a taste for literature, he said that there was no greater delight to him than passing from one of the studies to the other--that each was a recreation after the other.
The effort to promote that element in the general culture of the student body which comes from literature, ancient and modern, gained especial strength from a source usually unpromising--the mathematical department.
Two professors highly gifted in this field exercised a wide and ennobling influence outside it. First of these was Evan William Evans, who had been known to me at Yale as not only one of the best scholars in the class of 1851, but also one of its two foremost writers. Later, he developed a passion for modern literature, and his influence was strongly felt in behalf of the humanities. His successor was James Edward Oliver, a graduate of Harvard, a genius in his chosen field, but always exercising a large influence by virtue of his broad, liberal, tolerant views of life which were promoted by study of the best thoughts of the best thinkers of all times.
