THOMAS DAY SEYMOUR. 863 



THOMAS DAY SEYMOUR (1848-1907) 



Fellow of Class III, Section 2, 1900. 



Thomas Day Seymour was born in Hudson, Ohio, on April 1, 1848, 

 and died in New Haven on December 31, 1907. He felt just pride 

 in his ancestry. His father, Nathan Perkins Seymour, was the sixth 

 descendant in direct line of Richard Seymour, a Devonshire man, who 

 emigrated and settled in Hartford in 1639, and became the ancestor of 

 many distinguished men in New York and Connecticut. His mother, 

 Elizabeth, was the daughter of Thomas Day of Hartford, for twenty- 

 six years Secretary of the State of Connecticut, and niece of President 

 Jeremiah Day of Yale College. 



Seymour's father graduated from Yale in 1834 and was tutor there 

 for four 3'ears. In 1840 he accepted the professorship of Greek and 

 Latin in Western Reserve College, then in Hudson. Here the younger 

 Seymour passed his boyhood, was fitted for college, spent four years 

 as an undergraduate, and, after two ye.irs in Europe, taught for eight 

 years. In 1874 he married Sarah, daughter of Henry L. Hitchcock, 

 then President of Western Reserve. His widow and a son and two 

 daughters still survive him. 



While in Hudson, Seymour had free access to his father's library, 

 which contained between two and three thousand carefully selected 

 volumes, and is said to have been, at one time, the best library west of 

 the AUeghanies. The ties that bound father and son were intimate 

 and tender. The elder Seymour was a man of refined and gentle 

 nature, an excellent classical scholar, and possessed also of a knowledge 

 of the German, French and Italian languages that was then unusual. 

 The son was a quiet and reserved, but happy, boy, who went singing 

 and whistling about the house. It is related that he was "a great 

 worker, with a passion for accuracy." He entered college in the 

 autumn of 1866, maintained the rank of first scholar, and at graduation 

 was valedictorian of his class, but he found leisure for other interests. 

 "He was no more a recluse then," a classmate writes, "than subse- 

 quently. Nobody was in closer touch with the whole body of stu- 

 dents." 



I The elder Seymour resigned his professorship in Western Reserve 

 College in 1870, and Thomas Seymour was then elected professor of 

 Greek there, with leave of absence for two years. He went to Europe 

 and studied in Leipsic and Berlin for a year and a half. In the spring 



