Word: blisse
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Except for a decade as editor of the "Atlantic" Bliss Perry has passed his life in "the pleasantness and most influential of academic paths." Professor of English Literature at Williams, then at Princeton, then at Harvard, he gained a reputation as one of the best-loved members of the coterie of Great Names in American Literary life. In his biography, published now in Bliss Perry's seventy fifth year, he re-creates the mellow charm of those years of his life...
Harvard is for Bliss Perry the "Cockpit of Learning." Up to the time of his appointment there had never been a chair of "English Literature", as he explains, "the term 'English' being considered clastic enough to cover both linguistic and literature courses. As "the successor of Ticknor, Longfellow and Lowell" Bliss Perry recalls an uncomfortable feeling that the public was getting the impression that Harvard was landing a bigger fish than it had actually caught. Barrett Wendell, who had complained about the abuse of Presidential power in making the appointment, was too honest to pretend to welcome Perry to Harvard...
...chapter on his days in German universities Bliss Perry accents the tremendously high requirement of scholarship of that day and the picturesque life of the German student. Germany was then the place to go to study English, although the work was largely philological and abstruse. He draws fascinating portraits of some of his instructors and colleagues there. Consistently an upholder of the liberal, appreciative approach to literature at Harvard Perry confesses that the discipline of sheer grinding on etymological facts and tables was a tonic...
Beautifully, informally written, Bliss Perry's biography is altogether alive from start to finish. It is perhaps the most compelling document of self-revelation penned by an American gentleman of letters. Its appeal to university men of the present and past is particularly great, and to the whole world it opens broad new vistas of life...
Morley: ... A sweet and dangerous opiate is Memory ... the bliss of anxious thought...