474 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



The period of his connection with the Courier was, in one respect at 

 least, the happiest and also the most unhappy in his career, both the 

 result of his marriage. In 1882 he was married to Miss Harriet L. 

 Vose, of Brunswick, Maine, who under the name of Eleanor Putnam 

 was a well-known magazine writer, and the author of a book on Old 

 Salem. Their union was a singularly ideal and sympathetic one, 

 sharing as they did to the full their intellectual tastes as well as their 

 devotion to each other, but after only four years of this companionship 

 she died, and to the end of his life he never ceased to mourn her. She 

 left him one child, Oric, to whom his affection was transferred and 

 centered more and more as the boy grew up. 



His literary career began soon after his arrival in Boston. His first 

 attempts were not successful in finding a publisher, but not discour- 

 aged by this experience he persevered, and in 1881 published his first 

 novel, "Patty's Perversities." For the next twenty-seven years he 

 continued a fairly regular output of novels, poems and essays, in spite 

 of his arduous professional labors. "Who's Who in America" for 

 1916-17, the last volume issued before his death, gives a list of twenty- 

 three titles with their dates, ending with "The Intoxicated Ghost" in 

 1908. While these books won and held for him the respect of his 

 literary associates they did not achieve the wide popularity for which 

 he had hoped, and it was doubtless the disappointment at this result 

 which led him to abandon writing during the last ten years of his life. 

 He was slow to recognize that his real strength lay not in fiction or 

 poetry but in essays. Of these he published only three volumes, the 

 two series of " Talks on Writing English " and the " Talks on the Study 

 of Literature," all of which are of permanent value, and delightful 

 reading because of his critical ability, his high standard of purity in 

 the use of our language, and his exhilarating freedom of thought and 

 expression. 



In 1893 he resigned his position on the Sunday Courier to accept the 

 professorship of English literature in the Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology. There he entered enthusiastically upon the most diffi- 

 cult task of his life and the one in which he achieved his greatest suc- 

 cess. To imbue a lot of young students who went to the Tech to fit 

 themselves for the most practical professions, with little or no time, as 

 they thought, for "ornamental" studies, to imbue them with the sense 

 that ability to express themselves in clear sound English should be an 



