... The fact is, I have a most voracious
appetite for knowledge. To its acquisition I will sacrifice
everything.... Nothing could induce me to relinquish the pleasures of
literature;... but I can be a lawyer. This will support my real
existence, literature an IDEAL one.
"I purchased last evening a beautiful pocket edition of Sir William
Jones's Letters, and have just finished reading them. Eight languages
he was critically versed in; eight more he read with a dictionary: and
there were twelve more not wholly unknown to him. I have somewhere
seen or heard the observation that as many languages as a person
acquires, so many times is he a man."
Happily--how happily we can hardly say--Madam Bowdoin had left the sum
of one thousand dollars towards establishing a professorship of modern
languages at the college which was then only a few years older than
Longfellow. No steps had yet been taken; but one of the Board, Mr.
Orr, having been struck, it appears, by the translation of an ode from
Horace made by Longfellow for the senior examination, warmly presented
his name for the new chair.
It is impossible to overestimate the value of these benefactions to
men of talent and genius. Where would Wordsworth have been, what could
he have done, without the gift bestowed upon him by Raisley Calvert!
In America such assistance is oftener given in the more impersonal way
of endowment of chairs or creating of scholarships.
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