George F. Hoar

But I regretted the transaction exceedingly, and have always considered that I was well punished for my joke at the expense of my unhappy classmate.

I was guilty of one practical joke of which I have repented all my days, but for which the poetical justice of Providence administered to me, many years afterward, a punishment in kind.

Instead of submitting himself, however, he maintained very sturdily that the visit of the official to his room was an outrage which he ought not be asked to endure.

My classmate, however, stood his ground like a Roman and told the officer that his room was his castle and that he had no right to come in.

That was to begin to deal with a legal principle in historic order, going back to the first case where it was announced and tracing it down through the reports, making no use of text-books.

The tree by the window has twice hailed the Spring Since we circled its trunk our last chorus to sing.

Just over the way, with its front to the street, Up one flight of stairs, is a room snug and neat, With a prospect Mark Tapley right jolly would call;-- Two churches, one graveyard, one bulging brick wall, Where, raven-like, Science gloats…

I never knew a man of such ready wit, although I have known a good many famous wits in my day.

To yield to him was never the way to win his good will.

He was fond of argument; never was contented without challenging somebody and was a very tough customer to encounter, whatever side of a question he chose to take.

Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights, How oft, unwearied, have we spent the nights In search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poetry,-- Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.

He went to California and became afterward unquestionably the greatest lawyer they have ever had on the Pacific Coast.

Perhaps, taking him all together, the most brilliant man in Harvard in my time was John Felton.

Slow he speaks in accents solemn, Life is all an empty hum, Man, by adulation only Can'st thou ever great become.

He has Longfellow's style very happily, including the dropping from a bright and sometimes a sublime line to one which is flat and commonplace, as for instance in the ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington.

You could not attack or rally him without some bright reply.

Such things lose nine-tenths of their flavor in the repetition and nine parts of the other tenth when they are put in writing.

Certainly if he had performed the promise of his boyhood he would have been one of the foremost men in American literature.

But I am inclined to think that the one member of our class whose fame will last to remote posterity, a fame which he will owe to a single poem, is Walter Mitchell.

In 1893 he wrote to a London magazine: "Although I have lived away from America upwards of forty-six years, I feel to this hour, that in writing English I am writing a foreign language.

He was ready at all times to do battle, in public or in private, when his countrymen were attacked.

I do not believe that anybody ever went through Harvard College who performed four years of such constant and strenuous labor.

I suppose some of the best of our American men of letters of late years would have submitted their productions to the criticism of Child as to a master.

He edited a collection of ballads, Little & Brown's edition of the British Poets, and was a thorough student of Shakespeare and Chaucer.

He became one of the most eminent scholars in the country in early English literature and language.