PROFESSOR WILLIAM CHAMBERLAIN.—PROFESSOR DANIEL OLIVER.—PROFESSOR JAMES FREEMAN DANA.

William Chamberlain, the successor of Professor Moore in the chair of Languages, was the son of General William and Jane (Eastman) Chamberlain, and was born at Peacham, Vt., May 24, 1797. From a reliable source we have the following account of him:

Perhaps there is on record no more worthy and comprehensive testimony to his character and his work than the few lines which the late President Lord furnished for the inscription on his tombstone. They read:

"William Chamberlain, Jr., A. M., Professor of Languages in Dartmouth College. A man of strong intellect, distinguished literary attainments, and moral worth.

"He added respectability to the institution, by prudence, efficiency, and a well-earned reputation; and contributed largely to promote its interests. By disinterested and unwearied labors, with fidelity in all his relations, beloved and honored, he filled up the measure of a short but useful life, and died with humble confidence in the Divine mercy, through the atonement of Jesus Christ, July 11, 1830, aged 33."

He gave to the college for ten years the unremitting labor of his life, and we may say his life itself. To his abundant and complete work as a teacher he added the labor of overseeing the material affairs of the college,—a labor devolved upon him, perhaps, on account of his superior executive ability.

Thus he superintended the building of Thornton and Wentworth Halls, and employed his vacations, and particularly the long winter vacation, in travelling over what was then the wilderness of northern New Hampshire and Vermont, in care of the wild lands belonging to the college. Stricken with pneumonia on one of these journeys,—he would not wait for a complete convalescence before returning to duty,—his malady assumed the chronic form, and terminated his life in about six months after its first invasion.

The influences of his early life were such as may well have conduced to a broad and strong character.

His mother belonged to a family long identified with the early history of southern New Hampshire.

His father, General William Chamberlain, after serving in the armies of the Revolution, became a pioneer settler of northern Vermont, where he acquired a handsome estate and a prominent public position. He became Lieutenant Governor of the State, and represented it in Congress for several terms. Among his public services may be mentioned his care for the Caledonia County Grammar School, where his sons were fitted for college. This school was at that time taught by Ezra Carter, a man greatly respected for his attainments and dignity of character.

Thus the future professor grew up amid the versatile life of the frontier, surrounded by the contests and traditions of public service.

Distinguished for scholarship in college, a bold but prudent leader among his classmates in their conflicts with the University,[43] immediately after graduation he became the preceptor of Moors Charity School, and a year later entered, as a student of law, the office of Daniel Webster in Boston. Thence, in his twenty-fourth year he was recalled to the college as professor of Languages, and in the ordinary and extraordinary service of the institution he was intensely occupied for the remainder of his short life.

A life so brief and active leaves behind it little but its example. Yet I shall venture to extract a few paragraphs from an address delivered by him on the 4th of July, 1826, the end of the first half century of our national life.

Remembering that they were written at a period before the great problems which have since controlled our history were recognized or appreciated among the people at large, they will be found to indicate a moral tone and a political prescience quite remarkable in a young man of twenty-eight years.

... "I have already alluded to it as the first of the appropriate duties of this day, to turn to Heaven in the exercise of devout gratitude, and render thanksgiving and praise to Him who was the God of our fathers in the day of their trial; who gave to them and has continued to us a fairer portion than was ever allotted to any other people. Is there one in this consecrated temple of the Almighty who would not join in the offering? I know it is unusual to dwell long upon such considerations at a time like this, but surely, if there ever were a call for a nation's gratitude to God, and ever a proper occasion for expressing it, we are the people in whose hearts that emotion should be deep and permanent, and this is a time to give it utterance."...

"We must do all in our power to promote liberal feelings among the several communities and sections of our federal republic, so as to preserve inviolate the Union of the States. Were this Union now in danger, it would call forth a more authoritative voice than mine; yet it may be in danger before the close of another half century. I will only speak my own conviction, that the States cannot be separated without the destruction of the country. They lie together on the bosom of this vast continent, a protection and an ornament, each to the other, and all to each, like the gems on the breast-plate of the Jewish Hierarch, indicative of the union of the Tribes, mutually lending and receiving lustre."...

"We must root out from among ourselves the institution of domestic slavery, or, before the close of another half century, we may have to abide the consequences of a servile war. In effecting this all-important object, we must indeed proceed gradually, temperately, in the observance of all good faith and good feeling toward the people of that portion of our Union on which the curse was entailed by the colonial policy of the mother country.

"It is a work which demands the full concurrence of all the States, and, sooner or later, it must be accomplished. Common sense will not cease to upbraid us with inconsistency, humanity will not be satisfied, nor Heaven fully propitiated, while we hold up boastfully in one hand this declaration, affirming that "all men are created equal," and grasp with the other the manacles and the scourge.

"Whatever may have been inferred by reason from a difference of physical attributes, and whatever may have been forced by criticism out of the word of God, the traffic in human flesh is contraband by the law of Nature written in our hearts, and forbidden by the whole tenor and spirit of the religion revealed in the Gospel.

"Even in the darker and imperfect dispensation of the ancient Jews, every fiftieth year, at least, brought freedom to all the inhabitants of the land. It is almost needless to say, that, if he who first procured the slave and brought him hither had no right to do so, then neither could he who bought him acquire a rightful ownership. There is no property to a private man in the life or the natural faculties of another; no right can accrue by purchase, or vest by possession, and no inheritance on either side descend. A title, which by its very nature was void from the beginning, can never be made good; a dominion which Heaven never gave, must be perpetuated, if at all, by means which it will never sanction."...

Surely, the trumpet of this youth gave no "uncertain sound."

To the recognition of such qualities it was due, probably, that in 1829 he was called to New York city to assume the editorship of a journal ("Journal of Commerce") founded by an association of gentlemen, and which afterwards exerted great influence upon public opinion. He declined the offer, unwilling to leave his Alma Mater at a critical epoch in her history. He stayed by her to die in her service.

His widow, Mrs. Sarah L. (Gilman) Chamberlain, daughter of Dr. Joseph Gilman, of Wells, Me., and niece of Mrs. President Brown, survived him twenty years, residing at Hanover. The memory of her moral, intellectual, and social worth is warmly cherished by all who knew her.

Mr. Lancaster adds: "Professor Chamberlain was tall, erect, square built, well-proportioned, and of graceful mien and bearing,—such a man as the eye could rest upon with pleasure. His voice was clear, sonorous, yet smooth and agreeable."

Professor Folsom says:

"Professor Chamberlain, the youngest member of the Faculty, who was only twenty-three years old when, in 1820, he entered on his professorship of the Latin and Greek Languages and Literature, and only thirty-three when he died, was much admired and loved and reverenced by many of us. To myself, whenever I think of Dartmouth, his image invariably appears, and he stands out among the objects presenting themselves second only to that of Dr. Tyler, as the latter appeared when at his best and noblest in the pulpit. It was indeed in that same pulpit, and before I came under his instruction, that I first heard him, when he delivered an oration on the Fourth of July in the year 1826. It was to a crowded audience, filling the floor and the galleries. I doubt whether there is one survivor of that number, whether student or townsman, from whose recollection can have faded away the image of the orator, his form and attitude, his voice and action, and some of his thrilling words, especially when he described the nation holding in one hand the Declaration of Independence which proclaims human equality, and with the other grasping the manacles and scourge to torture millions of human beings bought and sold, and compelled to labor in slavery.

Professor Chamberlain took charge of the Class of 1828 in Latin and Greek when they entered on their Junior year. As soon as our class met him in the east recitation-room—he being seated at a small table on his left, and the class in lines of a half-parallelogram extending on the right and in front of him—we felt that we had come under a noble teacher. Some of us who loved the languages that he taught, and also had become acquainted with the best of the upper classes, carried with us none other than very high anticipations of a most profitable and pleasant term of study. And so it proved. How he used to electrify us at times by repeating something that had just been recited, as at the close of the Agricola of Tacitus, his strongly marked face all lighted up, new significance and something like inspiration being given us, when with his deliberate, distinct, emphatic, rhythmical, rich utterance, flowed out that prophetic sentence in the world's literature, 'Quidquid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque in animis hominum, in aeternitate temporum, in fama rerum!'

"I remember that while my class were in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles and the Medea of Euripides, I was suffering from weak eyes, and went to the recitation-room with no other preparation than that of hearing each lesson twice read to me by two different students, who did me the kindness to perform that service. But with Professor Chamberlain's luminous explanation and comment, no Greek of my whole college course more deeply interested and helped me.

"He heard the rehearsal of my Commencement oration, and some of his words on that occasion I have not ceased to remember with gratitude. Nor was I the only one who received from him words of encouragement that proved of most valuable service in our subsequent career. Still it was the moral element that constituted his highest power of influencing young men, and was his distinguishing personality. May I say, for one, that in this moral and spiritual personality he has again and again come to me since his departure, and been a present helper toward whatever of good I have attained in life.

"A single anecdote will serve to illustrate the love with which his pupils cherish his memory. I cannot but think that every survivor of my class must have some recollection of the fact, and share all my feelings in regard to it. He had been occasionally late at recitation, and the class, to give him a lesson of promptness, one morning having assembled as usual after service in chapel, and waited some four minutes past the hour, carried the vote to go to our rooms; and so, the professor just turning the corner, and hastening up the slope, and his approach being announced by some on the lookout, we dashed out, through the rear doors, or up the stairways, and not a solitary member of the class remained in the room. The next morning he was already there when we reached the place, made no remark on the occurrence of the previous day, and none of us could discern in him the faintest trace of displeasure. When, two years after we graduated, I heard of his death, I remembered a slight, hacking cough which he had, and that slightly bent, spare, though large and tall frame, and always placid face, and realized for the first time that what we imputed to him as a fault was the hindrance of disease, and possibly of sleepless nights; and I would have given a world for an opportunity to ask his forgiveness."[44]

Another pupil says of Professor Chamberlain:

"He was well-proportioned, tall, active, and energetic. His expression was dignified and commanding. In his word there was power. Integrity marked all his life. His word was as good as his bond. His principles were firmly grasped and implicitly followed. His intellectual powers were of a high order. He impressed every acquaintance with his intellectual greatness. His discourse was lofty but impressive.

"His religious life was less marked in public. He united with no church, though he was a man of prayer and from his dying bed sent a religious message to the students."

From a reliable source we have the following notice of another of Dartmouth's eminent and honored teachers:

Daniel Oliver, whose name appears on the list of teachers of past years in both the Medical and Academical departments of Dartmouth College, was born on the 9th of September, 1787. He was the third son of the Rev. Thomas Fitch Oliver, at that time rector of St. Michael's, Marblehead, and belonged to a family distinguished in the history of Massachusetts from the earliest period of the colony. He was a direct descendant of Mr. Thomas Oliver, whom Winthrop calls "an experienced and very skilful surgeon," and who acted as one of the ruling elders of the church in Boston soon after his arrival in 1632. Through his mother he was descended from William Pynchon, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Colony, and the Rev. William Hubbard, the historian of New England; and, through his paternal grandmother he was a descendant of the Rev. John Eliot, the noted Indian missionary.

After the death of his father, which took place at Garrison Forest, near Baltimore, before he had attained his tenth year, he was placed in the care of Colonel Lloyd Rogers, of that city, and almost immediately commenced his preparatory course for college, applying himself to his studies with great diligence, and entered. Harvard College in 1802. Although fond of study, and possessed of a mind of unusual vigor and brilliancy, the ambitions of college life do not seem to have dimmed the memories of his forest home in the South, and in his letters, while at Cambridge, he more than once recalls the pleasant hours when living within its shades, in a strain at once suggestive of a refined and poetic nature.

To one of his thoughtful and contemplative mind it is not strange that, suddenly transferred from the quiet of home life to the turmoil of college scenes, he should have found much that was distasteful; and the following extract from a letter to him from the late Mr. Justice Story, at that time betrothed to his eldest sister, and with whom he was on terms of intimacy, would seem to imply no little disquietude on the part of his student friend during the earlier years of his life at Cambridge.

"You can hardly imagine with what delight I recur to the days which I spent at Cambridge. In the delightful seclusion from noisy vulgarity, in the sweet interchange of kind sentiments, and in the mutual competition of classic pursuits, I possessed a unity and tranquillity of purpose far beyond the merits of my later years. My first years there were not marked with this peculiar character. It was in my Junior and Senior years that, from forming a choice of friends, and participating in the higher views of literature, I felt that happiness resulted in the activity of intellect and possession of friendship. That period will in future be yours; and though you may start with surprise at the thought at this moment, that period will be marked out in the calendar of your years as among the dies fortunatos. You and I are not widely distinct in years, and you can therefore readily believe that this attachment is not the moral relation of comparison and experience; no, it was reality which charmed me when present, and reflects a lustre in remembrance. Go on, then, my dear fellow, in the academic course with awakened hope. A high destiny awaits you. The joys of youth shall give spirit to the exertions of manhood, and the pursuits of literature yield a permanent felicity attainable only by the votaries of taste. Sweet are the attainments which accomplish the wishes of friends. Our reliance upon you is founded on a belief that ambition and literature will unite us in as close bonds as sympathy and affinity.

"On a subject so interesting to me as my collegiate course I seldom reflect without melancholy; not a harsh and dark brooding, but a soft and tender pensiveness which

"The thousand associations of festivity, pleasantry, study, and recreation live to hallow the whole. The picture, by its distance, loses its defects, and retains only the strong colorings of primitive impression. Never do I cast my eyes on that dear seat of letters but I exclaim involuntarily with Gray:

"By the way, when you are at leisure and feel a little dull, I advise you to take up some of our good-natured writers, such as Dr. Moore, Goldsmith, Coleman, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Smollett's novels, or the pleasant and airy productions of the muse. These I have always found a powerful anti-splenetic; and, although I am not a professed physician, I will venture to prescribe to you in this instance with all the confidence of Hippocrates. The whole system of nostrums from that arch-quack, the old serpent, down to the far-famed Stoughton of our own day, does not present so powerful a remedy, amid all its antis, as cheerful reading to a heavy spirit. I will venture to say, in the spirit of Montesquieu, that an hour of such reading will place one quietly in his elbow chair in all the tranquillity of a Platonic lover."

It is probable that Mr. Story's influence was not without its effect in reconciling his young friend to college life, for he was very soon to be found among the foremost in the race for honorable distinction. He was graduated with distinguished honor, in 1806, in a class of remarkable ability, among whom were the late Hon. Alexander Everett, Judge William P. Preble, Professor J. G. Cogswell, and the venerable Dr. Jacob Bigelow, its last surviving member.

After leaving college he began the study of law under the direction of Mr. Story, but very soon abandoned it, and entered the office of his uncle, the late Dr. B. Lynde Oliver, of Salem, as a student of medicine. In 1809, he entered the University of Pennsylvania, at that time distinguished by the names of Rush, Wistar, and Physick, and by his talents and attainments soon attracted the notice of Dr. Rush, whose favorite pupil and warm friend he afterwards became. On receiving his medical degree, the following letter, written in terms of the highest compliment, was addressed by Dr. Rush to his uncle and former instructor.

On his return to Salem, Dr. Oliver commenced the practice of medicine, and in July, 1811, as appears from his diary, he connected himself with Dr. R. D. Mussey, then a rising young surgeon, and with whom he was afterwards so long associated. From the following entry in the diary referred to, under date of July 12, 1812, may be learned somewhat of his tastes at this time, and his mode of passing the waiting hours of an early professional life:

"This day completed the first year of my connection in the medical profession with Dr. R. D. Massey. On reviewing this period, I am sensible of a great loss of time, and of a degree of professional and literary improvement altogether inadequate to such an extent of time. Some improvement, however, has I hope, been made. With respect to the books which I have read during the past year, the most important are Mosheim's 'Ecclesiastical History,' which I have not yet quite completed,—a learned and judicious outline of the history of the church, embracing many collateral topics of learning and philosophy ...; Homer's 'Iliad' in Greek, with the exception of the last book; the 'Æneid' except the last two; two or three books of Livy, and several of Juvenal's 'Satires.'

"The most important literary enterprise which I have undertaken and accomplished has been the delivery of a course of lectures on Chemistry in connection with Dr. Mussey. In Anatomy, also, we have executed something. Medicine will, in future, claim more of my attention, but not to the neglect of the two important collateral branches above mentioned."

In the autumn of 1815, Dr. Oliver was appointed to deliver a course of chemical lectures before the medical class at Dartmouth College. Although he had thus far pursued the study of chemistry as a collateral branch of medical science, he felt warranted in accepting the appointment, without, however, proposing to himself a more permanent position in this department.

In 1817, he was married to Miss Mary Robinson Pulling, the only daughter of Edward Pulling, Esq., an eminent barrister of Salem, and almost immediately went again to Philadelphia to avail himself of the advantages of that seat of medical learning, returning to Salem in the spring of 1818.

In the following year he was induced to undertake, in connection with the Hon. John Pickering, the preparation of a Greek lexicon, a work involving much labor and research, and the larger portion of which fell to his lot. Although mainly based on the Latin of Schrevelius, many of the interpretations were new, and there were added more than two thousand new articles. The magnitude of the task and its successful accomplishment at once raised him to a conspicuous rank among the scholars of his day.

In the summer of 1820 he accepted an appointment to the professorship of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, and of Materia Medica and Therapeutics in Dartmouth College, where he delivered his first course of lectures in the following autumn. He was also made Professor of Botany, and his lectures upon Physiology were among his most valuable contributions to medical literature. He took up his permanent residence in Hanover, in August, 1821, and from this time to the close of his connection with the college he was most faithful to all its interests. In 1825 he was appointed to the chair of Intellectual Philosophy in the Academical department of the college, a position which he filled with the ability that distinguished him elsewhere. The address delivered by him on the occasion of his induction into this professorship, upon the "Comparative Importance of the Study of Mental Science," was thus far, perhaps, his most successful literary effort. Clear, comprehensive, and abounding in passages of remarkable beauty and force, it established the reputation of its author both as a writer and a metaphysician.

In 1835 was published his "First Lines in Physiology," a treatise which received the highest commendation both at home and abroad. It passed through three editions, and although the rapid advance in physiological science since its publication has long since led to its disuse, it will still be admired by medical scholars for the purity of its style and the learning it everywhere displays.

In the spring of 1837, Dr. Oliver closed his connection with the college, and returned to Cambridge, where he was temporarily residing at the time of his appointment, again to resume the practice of his profession. He, however, delivered a course of lectures at the Dartmouth Medical School in the autumn of this and the following year. He was also induced, in 1840, after declining professorships both in St. Mary's College, Baltimore, and in Pennsylvania University, to deliver a course of lectures on Materia Medica at the Medical College of Ohio, but he resigned the chair at the close of the session, and returned again to Cambridge, where he resided to the close of his life. Although in declining health at this time, he did not relinquish professional practice until within a few months of his death, which took place on the 1st of June, 1842.

During his comparatively brief career, Dr. Oliver had become widely known as a medical and general scholar. As a teacher in the various departments of medical science with which he was connected he was also eminently successful. His lectures, always prepared with great care, were written with remarkable clearness and elegance, and were often listened to with attention by many outside the ranks of the profession. "His lectures to the under-graduates of the college," says a contemporary,[45] "would be thought, I am persuaded, still more remarkable than those upon Physiology. They were intended to exhibit the present state of mental philosophy. And the singular clearness with which he discriminated the settled points of absolute knowledge in this comprehensive and yet imperfect science, his happy development of intricate and complicated principles, and the beautiful colors which a true poetic spirit enabled him now and then to throw over the bald peaks and angles of this cold region, entitle him to a rank among metaphysicians as eminent as he maintained in his appropriate profession."

[45] Eulogy on Daniel Oliver, delivered by Rev. C. B. Haddock, professor of Belles Lettres.