FRANCIS JAMES CHILD. 839 



vard, dear to him, were devoting themselves. He cherished with pecu- 

 liar teuderness the memory of those who fell in the war. He was the 

 main promoter of the two precious volumes of Harvard Memorial Biogra- 

 phies ; and on the walls of his study, always before his eyes, close by the 

 portraits of his old masters in learning, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm 

 Grimm, were those of his young heroic friends, the brothers Charles and 

 James Lowell. 



His fidelity in the discharge of the exacting duties of his professorship 

 was complete. For far too many years far too much of his time was 

 occupied in the correction of students' themes. He never shirked this 

 wearisome drudgery. No teacher was ever more exacting of himself iu 

 the discharge of his regular duties. In the later years of his life, when 

 he suffered much from gout and rheumatism, he did not allow pain or de- 

 pression of spirits to interfere with the regular discharge of his task as 

 instructor. 



Even the dullest and most careless vmdergraduate could hardly fail to 

 be quickened and improved by such teaching as Mr. Child's. Here was 

 a master of most accurate and extensive learning, a scholar of unwearied 

 diligence and exact method, with the faculties and sympathies which 

 enabled him to impart his learning to his pupils, and to inspire in the 

 more capable among them something of his own enthusiasm for the best 

 in literature and life. 



It is impossible not to regret that Mr. Child should not have done 

 more independent literary work. The several introductions to the Bal- 

 lads in his great collection, excellent as they are in their kind, very 

 seldom afford him free space for the display of his own genius ; but they 

 abound in touches which light up the page with gleams of fancy or of 

 humor, and more rarely with a flash of poetic imagination that reveals 

 the restraint which the editor had imposed upon himself. His style when 

 at freedom was of tiie best, — for it was the simple expression of the 

 man himself. 



Original, quaint, humorous, sweet, sympathetic, tender-hearted, faith- 

 ful, — these are the terms which first come to mind in describing him ; 

 the traits that these terms imply included all his intelligence, gave char- 

 acter to his work, and made his learning the least part of him. 



Those who knew him best think of him mainly as one who had the 

 gift of love. He was a lover of nature, of poetry, of roses, of all that 

 was fair and sweet and good ; above all he was a lover of his fellow men. 

 When he died the world lost much more than one of its great scholars. 



C. E, Norton. 



