Word: dwight
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, began a series of journeys for the sake of vacation recreation. These excursions he kept up for a number of years, and visited at one time or another nearly every town in New England and many in New York. At about the same period he became curious to know the manner in which New England appeared eighty or a hundred years before his time. He was unable to find any information such as he searched for. He was led to think, therefore, that those who lived eighty or a hundred years after him might...
These travels were begun in 1796, and as it is now 1876, President Dwight's eighty years are just completed, and the time has come to take down his ponderous volumes from the shelves, and after having brushed off the dust which has been accumulating for eight decades, to obtain a view of the country as it appeared at the end of the last century. Besides, this is the Centennial year, when people everywhere are looking up the records of the past. So let every New-Englander and New-Yorker, and every one who is interested in any New England...
...When Dr. Dwight visited this region, Cambridge had a population of only about two thousand. "The houses," he says, "exhibit every gradation of building found in this country, except the log hut. Several handsome villas and other houses are seen here, a considerable number of decent ones, and a number, not small, of such as are ordinary and ill-repaired." In regard to these last the good Doctor had a theory of his own. He thought they must be "inhabited by men accustomed to rely on the University for subsistence; men whose wives are the chief support of their families...
...President, three Professors, four Tutors, and the Librarian; the number of students averaged two hundred and twenty; the library had fifteen thousand volumes, and was then "unquestionably the best in the United States." "Here the leaning is towards the languages, in Yale College towards the arts and sciences," President Dwight says; but he regrets that even here the admission requirements in Latin ("to speak true Latin and write it in verse as well as prose") were being "continually lowered by gradual concessions." The buildings then were "four colleges, a chapel, and a house, originally a private dwelling, now called College...
...Dwight's first remark on Boston is the same as that of ordinary mortals, - it is in regard to the streets. Next he laments (as Dr. Holmes did only last year) "that the scheme of forming public squares should have been almost universally forgotten." The houses he calls "superior to those of every American city," and says they "appear with peculiar advantage on Mount Vernon (which used to be called Beacon Hill)." He characterizes the people as being "noted for intelligence, love of liberty, generosity, and civility." They are, he says, "distinguished by a lively imagination, having characters more resembling...