Word: ticknor
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Intelligent New Engenders were esteemed in Europe as citizens of a young republic who represented a kind of life Europe had never known. When wellborn, serious, intelligent George Ticknor traveled there in 1815 he met Byron, who was pleased with him; Goethe, who was also pleased with him. Ticknor was typical of the travelers who found intellectual stimulation abroad, brought back food for speculation that quickened the minds of a generation, yet did not lose his sense of allegiance and duty to his own country as did the later expatriates. At the end he is seen as a dry, superior...
...century higher learning in the United States. The graduate schools of arts and sciences of today are modelled on the German universities of 1820, and it was Harvard College and Harvard men who took the lead in the development of the modern graduate school. Mr. Long's essays on Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell, Longfellow, Bancroft, and Motley are this not only chapters in the history of faste and scholarship in this country but are also chapters, and important ones, in Harvard history...
...fresh from college, sent by the Harvard Corporation for three years' study in Germany in order to become, as President Kirkland expressed it, "an accomplished philologian and biblical critic, able to expound and defend the Revelation of God." Bancroft was not so uncritically enthusiastic as his predecessors had been. Ticknor had written that there was more "absolute learning in Germany than in all the rest of the world besides." But Bancroft was too fastidious to find the unkempt German students congenial, agreeing with the sentiments of Longfellow's mother, who wrote her son when he contemplated a period of study...
What is most important, however, is that they all come back from their Goettingen discipline, and their visits to Goethe (Cogswell persuaded Goethe to give a set of his works to the Harvard Library) to plant the seeds of German academic culture in this country. Ticknor and Longfellow were the first and second incumbents of the chair later distinguished by James Russell Lowell and Bliss Perry. Mr. Long treats the academic influence of the pioneers fully. These are, it is worth repeating, significant chapters in the history of education in the United States...
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...