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Robert of Lincoln at length is made

Sober with work, and silent with care;
Off is his holiday garment laid,
Half forgotten that merry air,
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink;
Nobody knows but my mate and I
Where our nest and our nestlings lie.
Chee, chee, chee.

Summer wanes; the children are grown;
Fun and frolic no more he knows;
Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone;
Off he flies, and we sing as he goes:
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink;

When you can pipe that merry old strain,
Robert of Lincoln, come back again.

1855.

Chee, chee, chee.

CORN-SHUCKING IN SOUTH CAROLINA-FROM THE LETTERS OF A

TRAVELLER.

BARNWELL DISTRICT,

South Carolina, March 29,1843.

But you must hear of the corn-shucking. The one at which I was present was given on purpose that I might witness the humors of the Carolina negroes. A huge fire of light-wood was made near the cornhouse. Light-wood is the wood of the long-leaved pine, and is so called, not because it is light, for it is almost the heaviest wood in the world, but because it gives more light than any other fuel. In clearing land, the pines are girdled and suffered to stand: the outer portion of the wood decays and falls off; the inner part, which is saturated with turpentine, remains upright for years, and constitutes the planter's provision of fuel. When a supply is wanted, one of these dead trunks is felled by the axe. abundance of light-wood is one of the boasts of South Carolina. Wherever you are, if you happen to be chilly, you may have a fire extempore; a bit of light wood and a coal give you a bright blaze and a strong heat in an instant. The negroes make fires of it in the fields where they work; and, when the mornings are wet and chilly, in the pens where they are milking the cows. At a plantation, where I passed a frosty night, I saw fires in a small inclosure, and was told by the lady of the house that she had ordered them to be made to warm the cattle.

The

The light-wood-fire was made, and the negroes dropped in from the neighboring plantations, singing as they came. The driver of the plantation, a colored man, brought out baskets of corn in the husk, and piled it in a heap; and the negroes began to strip the husks from the ears, singing with great glee as they worked, keeping time to the music, and now and then throwing in a joke and an extravagant burst of laughter. The songs were generally of a comic character; but one of them was set to a singularly wild and plaintive air, which some of our musicians would do well to reduce to notation. These are the words:

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The alligator's back is furnished with a toothed ridge, like the edge of a saw, which explains the last line.

When the work of the evening was over the negroes adjourned to a spacious kitchen. One of them took his place as musician, whistling, and beating time with two sticks upon the floor. Several of the men came forward and executed various dances, capering, prancing, and drumming with heal and toe upon the floor, with astonishing agility and perseverance, though all of them had performed their daily tasks and had worked all the evening, and some had walked from four to seven miles to attend the corn-shucking. From the dances a transition was made to a mock military parade, a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the evolutions were extremely ludicrous. It became necessary for the commander to make a speech, and confessing his incapacity for public speaking, he called upon a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his stead. Toby, a man of powerful frame, six feet high, his face ornamented with a beard of fashionable cut, had hitherto stood leaning against the wall, looking upon the frolic with an air of superiority. He consented, came forward, demanded a bit of paper to hold in his hand, and harangued the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump-speeches in his day. He spoke of " de majority of Sous Carolina," de interests of de state," "de honor of ole Ba'nwell district," and these phrases he connected by various expletives, and sounds of which we could make nothing. At length he began to falter, when the captain with admirable presence of mind came to his relief, and interrupted and closed the harangue with an hurrah from the company. Toby was allowed by all the spectators, black and white, to have made an excellent speech.

66

JOHN HOWARD BRYANT, the brother of the preceding, who has become known by his verses, chiefly descriptive of nature, was born at Cummington, July 22, 1807. His first poem, entitled My Native Village, appeared in 1826, in his brother's periodical, The United States Review. Having accomplished himself in various studies, in 1831 he emigrated to Illinois, where he established himself as a farmer, and where he has

since occupied himself in agricultural life, occasionally writing poems, which have found their way to the public through the press. The following is a characteristic specimen of his muse:

LINES ON FINDING A FOUNTAIN IN A SECLUDED part of a

FOREST.

Three hundred years are scarcely gone,

Since, to the New World's virgin shore,
Crowds of rude men were pressing on,
To range its boundless regions o'er.
Some bore the sword in bloody hands,

And sacked its helpless towns for spoil;
Some searched for gold the river's sands,

Or trenched the mountain's stubborn soil.
And some with higher purpose sought,
Through forests wild and wastes uncouth,
Sought with long toil, yet found it not,
The fountain of eternal youth.

They said in some green valley where
The foot of man had never trod,
There gushed a fountain bright and fair
Up from the ever verdant sod.

There they who drank should never know
Age, with its weakness, pain, and gloom,
And from its brink the old should go,

With youth's light step and radiant bloom.
Is not this fount, so pure and sweet,

Whose stainless current ripples o'er The fringe of blossoms at my feet,

The same those pilgrims sought of yore! How brightly leap, 'mid glittering sands, The living waters from below;

O let me dip these lean, brown hands,

Drink deep and bathe this wrinkled brow, And feel, through every shrunken vein,

The warm, red stream flow swift and freeFeel waking in my heart again,

Youth's brightest hopes, youth's wildest glee. Tis vain, for still the life-blood plays,

With sluggish course, through all my frame; The mirror of the pool betrays

My wrinkled visage, still the same. And the sad spirit questions still—

Must this warm frame-these limbs that yield To each light motion of the will

Lie with the dull clods of the field?

Has nature no renewing power

To drive the frost of age away?
Has earth no fount, or herb, or flower,
Which man may taste and live for aye?
Alas! for that unchanging state

Of youth and strength, in vain we yearn;
And only after death's dark gate

Is reached and passed, can youth return.

JOHN D. GODMAN.

JOHN D. GODMAN was born at Annapolis, Maryland, December 20, 1794.. Deprived in his second year of both his parents, he was left dependent on the care of an aunt, who discharged her duties towards him with great tenderness. He had the misfortune to lose this relative also at the early age of seven years.

Having lost by some fraudulent proceeding the small estate left him by his father, Godman, after the death of his aunt, by whom he had been placed at school, was apprenticed to a printer at Baltimore. Desirous of leading the life of a scholar

he commenced and continued in this pursuit with reluctance.

In 1814, on the entrance of the British into Chesapeake Bay, he became a sailor in the navy, and was engaged in the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

In the following year he was invited by Dr. Luckey, who had become acquainted with the young printer while engaged in the study of his profession, to become an inmate of his residence at Elizabethtown. Gladly availing himself of this opening to the pursuit of the profession of his choice, Godman obtained a release from his indentures and devoted himself with ardor to study under the direction of his friend. Having thus passed a few months, he continued his course with Dr. Hall of Baltimore; and after attending lectures in that city, and in the latter part of his course filling the place of Professor Davidge during his temporary absence, he took his degree February 7, 1818.

After practising a short time in the villages of New Holland on the Susquehanna, in Ann Arundel county, and in the city of Philadelphia, he accepted the appointment of Professor of Anatomy in the recently established Medical College of Ohio, at Cincinnati, and entered upon his duties in October, 1821. Owing to difficulties " of which he was neither the cause nor the victim" he resigned his chair in a few months, and commenced a medical periodical, projected by Dr. Drake, entitled the Western Quarterly Reporter. Six numbers, of one hundred pages each, of this work were published.

In the autumn of 1822, he removed to Philadelphia, suffering much from exposure on the journey, owing to the lateness of the season and the delicacy of his constitution. He opened a room in the latter city under the auspices of the University, for private demonstrations in anatomy, a pursuit to which he devoted himself for some years with such assiduity as to still further impair his health.

In 1826, he removed to New York in acceptance of a call to the professorship of Anatomy in Rutgers Medical College. He delivered two courses of lectures with great success, but was then compelled to seek relief from exertion and a rigorous climate by passing a winter in the West Indies. After his return in the following summer, he settled at Germantown, where he remained, gradually sinking under a consumption, until his death, April 17, 1830.

His principal work, the American Natural History, was commenced in the spring of 1823, and completed in 1828, when it appeared in three volumes octavo. It is a work of much research, the author having journeyed many hundreds of miles as well as passed many months in his study

in its preparation, and has been as much admired for its beauty of style as accuracy and fulness of information. Commencing with the aboriginal Indian, he pursues his inquiry through all the varieties of animal life, closing with an article on the Whale Fishery, and including the extinct Mastodon. Confining himself almost exclusively to description of the subject before him, we have little or no digression on the scenes in which his information was acquired, and the incidents connected with his researches. These themes he has touched upon in a later publication, The Rambles of a Naturalist, written with a frame enfeebled by disease, but with a mind still preserving its freshness, and in a style still vigorous. A portion of these essays first appeared in a weekly journal in Philadelphia. The series is incomplete, having been interrupted by the author's death.

Dr. Godman was for some time editor of the Philadelphia Journal of the Medical Sciences, and contributed largely to its pages until the close of his life. He was also the author of several articles in the American Quarterly Review, and of the notices of Natural History in the Encyclopædia Americana to the completion of the letter C. He translated and annotated many foreign medical works, and published a number of lectures and addresses delivered on various professional and public occasions, which were collected in a volume towards the close of his life.

At an early stage of his professional career, Dr. Godinan adopted the atheistic views of some of the French naturalists. He retained these errors until the winter of 1827, when he was called to attend the death-bed of a student of medicine, who was possessed of "the comfort of a reasonable faith." His mind was so impressed by the scene, that he devoted himself to the study of the scriptures, and became a devoutly religious man.

The unremitting labor of Dr. Godman's career was sustained by the impetuosity and energy of his character. He knew no rest but in change of study, and no relaxation out of the range of his profession as a naturalist. In the directness, the simplicity and amiability of his character, he exhibited in an eminent degree the usual results of an enlightened communion with nature.

THE PINE FOREST.

Those who have only lived in forest countries, where vast tracts are shaded by a dense growth of oak, ash, chestnut, hickory, and other trees of deciduous foliage, which present the most pleasing varieties of verdure and freshness, can have but little idea of the effect produced on the feelings by aged forests of pine, composed in great degree of a single species, whose towering summits are crowned with one dark green canopy, which successive seasons find unchanged, and nothing but death causes to vary. Their robust and gigantic trunks rise a hundred or more feet high, in purely proportioned columns, before the limbs begin to diverge; and their tops, densely clothed with long bristling foliage, intermingle so closely as to allow of but slight entrance to the sun. Hence the undergrowth of such forests is comparatively slight and thin, since none but shrubs and plants that love the shade can flourish under this perpetual exclusion of the animating and invigorating rays of the great exciter of the vegetable world. Through such forests and by the merest footpaths in great part, it was my lot to pass many

miles almost every day; and had I not endeavoured to derive some amusement and instruction from the study of the forest itself, my time would have been as fatiguing to me as it was certainly quiet and solemn. But wherever nature is, and under whatever form she may present herself, enough is always proffered to fix attention and produce pleasure, if we will condescend to observe with carefulness. I soon found that even a pine forest was far from being devoid of interest.

A full grown pine forest is at all times a grand and majestic object to one accustomed to moving through it. Those vast and towering columns, sustaining a waving crown of deepest verdure; those robust and rugged limbs standing forth at a vast height overhead, loaded with the cones of various seasons; and the diminutiveness of all surrounding objects compared with these gigantic children of nature, cannot but inspire ideas of seriousness and even of melancholy. But how awful and even tremendous does such a situation become, when we hear the first wailings of the gathering storm, as it stoops upon the lofty summits of the pine, and soon increases to a deep hoarse roaring, as the boughs begin to wave in the blast, and the whole tree is forced to sway before its power!

In a short time the fury of the wind is at its height, the loftiest trees bend suddenly before it, and scarce regain their upright position ere they are again obliged to cower beneath its violence. Then the tempest literally howls, and amid the tremendous reverberations of thunder, and the blazing glare of the lightning, the unfortunate wanderer hears around him the crash of numerous trees hurled down by the storm, and knows not but the next may be precipitated upon him. More than once have I witnessed all the grandeur, dread, and desolation of such a scene, and have always found safety either by seeking as quickly as possible a spot where there were none but young trees, or if on the main road choosing the most open and exposed situation, out of the reach of the large trees. There, seated on my horse, who seemed to understand the propriety of such patience, I would quietly remain, however thoroughly drenched, until the fury of the wind was completely over. To say nothing of the danger from falling trees, the peril of being struck by the lightning, which so frequently shivers the loftiest of them, is so great as to render any attempt to advance, at such a time, highly imprudent.

Like the ox among animals, the pine tree may be looked upon as one of the most universally useful of the sons of the forest. For all sorts of building, for firewood, tar, turpentine, rosin, lampblack, and a vast variety of other useful products, this tree is invaluable to man. Nor is it a pleasing contemplation, to one who knows its usefulness, to observe to how vast an amount it is annually destroyed in this country, beyond the proportion that nature can possibly supply. However, we are not disposed to believe that this evil will ever be productive of very great injury, especially as coal fuel is becoming annually more extensively used. Nevertheless, were I the owner of a pine forest, I should exercise a considerable degree of care in the selection of the wood for the axe.

BOWDOIN COLLEGE.

THIS institution, seated at Brunswick, in the state of Maine, after some early preliminary efforts, received its charter from the Legislature of Massachusetts, to which the region was then attached, June 24, 1794. Five townships of land

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were granted from the unsettled districts of Maine, as a foundation for the College. A munificent grant of money and lands, of the estimated value of six thousand eight hundred dollars, made by the Hon. James Bowdoin, son of the governor from whom the college was named, was an additional means of support; though from the difficulty of bringing the lands into market, and the necessity of waiting for further funds, the institution did not go into operation till 1801, when the board of trustees and overseers elected the Rev. Joseph McKeen the first president. He was a man of marked character and usefulness, a native of Londonderry, N.H., born in 1757, who had been associated with the best interests of education and religion at the Academy of Andover, and in pastoral relations in Boston and Beverly, Mass., from the last of which he was called to the presidency.

The first college building was at the same time in progress on the site selected, on an elevated plain, about one mile south from the Androscoggin river. There, in September, 1802, the president and the professor of languages, John Abbot of Harvard, were installed: a platform erected in the open air, in the grove of pines on the land, serving the purpose of the as yet unfinished Massachusetts Hall. When this building was completed it was parlor, chapel, and hall for the college uses; the president living in one of the rooms with his family, and summoning his pupils to morning and evening prayers in the temporary chapel on the first floor, by striking with his cane on the staircase.* For two years the president, with Professor Abbot, sustained the college instruction alone, which commenced with the usual requisitions of the New England institutions.

At the first Commencement, in 1806, there were eight graduates. The following year the college met with a great loss in the death of President McKeen, whose character had imparted strength to the institution.

The Rev. Jesse Appleton, of Hampton, N. H., was chosen his successor. He had been a few

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years before a prominent candidate for the theological chair of Harvard University, and he now took an active part in his similar duties by the delivery of a course of more than fifty lectures on the most important subjects in theology, a portion of which has been since published. His system of instruction was accurate and thorough. He continued president of the college till his death, at the age of forty-seven, November 12, 1819. An edition of his works was published in two volumes at Andover, in 1837, embracing his course of Theological Lectures, his Academical Addresses, and a selection from his Sermons, with a Memoir of his Life and Character, by Professor Packard, who holds the chair of Ancient Languages and Classical Literature at Bowdoin.

The Rev. William Allen, who had been president of Dartmouth University, and to whom the public is indebted for the valuable Dictionary of American Biography, was chosen the new president, and continued in the office for twenty years, with the exception of a short interval in 1831, when he was removed by an act of the Legislature, which had taken to itself authority to control the affairs of the college, in consequence of a cession of the old charter from Massachusetts to the new state of Maine on its organization in 1820, and the procurement of a new charter, which placed the institution in a measure under the control of the state. The question was finally adjudicated before Mr. Justice Story, in the circuit court of the United States, when a decision was given sustaining the rights of the college, which had been violated, and President Allen was restored to his office.

On his retirement in 1839, he was succeeded by the Rev. Dr. Leonard Woods, son of the venerable Dr. Woods of Andover. As a philosophical writer and theologian, Dr. Woods has sustained a high reputation by his conduct of the early volumes of the Literary and Theological Review, published at New York in 1834, and subsequently. He has also published a translation, from the French, of De Maistre's Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.

Of the college professors Dr. Parker Cleaveland, the eminent mineralogist, has held the chair

194

CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

of Natural Philosophy since 1805. He is the author of a popular elementary treatise on Mineralogy and Geology, which has been long before the public in successive editions.

The Rev. Thomas C. Upham, the author of several works on mental and moral science, was appointed Professor of Mental Philosophy and Ethics in 1824. He still holds the office, and discharges also the duties of an instructor in the Hebrew language. He is the author of The Elements of Mental Philosophy; of a Treatise on the Will; of a volume of a practical character, entitled Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action, published in 1843; and a series of works, unfolding the law of Christianity from its spring in the inner life, which bear the titles Principles of Interior or Hidden Life, and the Life of Faith. In illustration of this develop ment of purity and holiness, Professor Upham was led to a close study of the writings of Madame Guyon, which has resulted in the publication, in 1855, of two volumes from his pen, entitled, Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon: together with some account of the Personal History and Religious Opinions of Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray.

The poet Longfellow was chosen Professor of Modern Languages in 1829, and discharged the duties of the oflice till 1835, when he was called to a similar post at Harvard.

A medical school, founded in 1821, is attached to the college. By the catalogue of 1854 it appears that the number of students at that date was seventy, and of the four college classes one hundred and seventy-seven.

UNION COLLEGE.

UNION COLLEGE, Schenectady, New York, dates
from the year 1795, when it received its charter
from the Regents of the University, a body insti-
tuted in the state in 1784, to whom was intrusted
the power of incorporating Colleges, which should
be endowed by the citizens of a particular locality.
Gen. Philip Schuyler took special interest in for-
warding the subscription. There had, however,
been an earlier effort to establish a College at
Schenectady. In 1782, an earnest application
had been made to the Legislature at Kingston for
this object, which, it should be noticed, was pur-
sued at a time when the interests of literature
were generally suspended by the scenes of the
Revolution. This was two years before the re-
opening of the College at New York.

The first President of the College was John
Blair Smith, a brother of the better known Presi-
dent of the College of New Jersey, but himself a
He
man of marked character and not without dis-
tinction in other portions of the country.
was born in 1756 at Pequea, in Pennsylvania,
received his education at Princeton, pursued a
course of theological study with his brother, then
President of Hampden Sidney College in Virgi-
nia, and, in 1779, succeeded him in that position.
His career as a preacher in the valley of Virginia
Dr. Alexander, who
became much celebrated.
saw him in the midst of the revival scenes of the
His hair
time, has left a vivid picture of the man: "In
person he was about the middle size.
was uncommonly black, and was divided on the

top and fell down on each side of the face. A
that it was common to say Dr. Smith looked you
large blue eye of open expression was so piercing,
through. His speaking was impetuous; after
going on deliberately for awhile, he would sud-
denly grow warm and be carried away with a
violence of feeling, which was commonly com-
municated to his hearers."* In 1791, he was
called to the Third Presbyterian Church in Phi-
ladelphia, and thence to the Presidency of Union,
former charge at Philadelphia, where he died
where he remained till 1799, returning to his
within a few months of the epidemic then
raging.

He was succeeded in the Presidency by Jona-
than Edwards, a son of the metaphysician. His
childhood had been passed at Stockbridge, Massa-
chusetts, where communication with the Indians
the duties of a missionary among the aborigines,
had taught him their language, and fitted him for
a career which the breaking out of the French
war prevented his pursuing. He completed his
studies at the College in New Jersey, was licens-
ed as a preacher after a course of theology with
the Rev. Dr. Bellamy, became Tutor at Prince-
Colebrook in Connecticut. From this retired
ton, and afterwards Pastor at Whiteham and at
position he was called to the Presidency of Union,
which he did not live long to occupy, dying two
years after, August 1, 1801. He was the author
of numerous productions, chiefly theological and
controversial, following out his father's acute
metaphysical turn. Besides A Dissertation on
Liberty and Necessity, and a number of special
Sermons, he published Observations on the Lan-
guage of the Stockbridge Indians, communicated
to the Connecticut Society of Arts and Sciences,
and since edited for the Massachusetts His-
torical Society's Collections, by the philologist
Pickering.

Jonathan Maxey was the third President, a native of Attleborough, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1768.

ance.

The united terms of the three first Presidents were but nine years, during which the College had hardly given evidence of its present importAt this time the Rev. Eliphalet Nott was He called to its head. The present venerable octogenarian was then in his thirty-first year. was born in 1773, of poor parents, in Ashford, Connecticut, and his youth had been passed in the frequent discipline of American scholars of that period, acquiring the means of properly educating himself by instructing others. He received the degree of Master of Arts from Brown University in 1795. He was soon licensed to preach, and established himself as clergyman and principal of an academy at Cherry Valley, in the state of New York, then a frontier settlement. From of the Presbyterian Church at Albany, where he 1798 to his election to the College he was Pastor delivered a discourse On the Death of Hamilton, which was published at the time, and which has been lately reprinted. It was an eloquent assertion of the high qualities of Hamilton, and a vigorous attack on the practice of duelling. The text, from the prophet Samuel, was a significant

Life of Archibald Alexander, p. 54

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