iv OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



mental dispositions, which was tempered but rarely by incursions 

 into the larger meanings of Hellenic literature, sufficed with but rare 

 exceptions for the generation under which Goodwin grew to man- 

 hood. In the year when, at the age of twenty-nine, he succeeded 

 Felton in the Eliot professorship, Goodwin gave evidence with a 

 certain brilliant audacity that he severed himself from the past. 

 The year i860 may well be taken as the mark of the appearance of 

 a new spirit in our classical scholarship. In that year Hadley at 

 Yale published his " Greek Grammar " based on the work of Georg 

 Curtius ; at Harvard, Goodwin brought out the book with which his 

 name will be longest associated — the " Syntax of the Moods and 

 Tenses of the Greek Verb." 



I cannot discover that Goodwin had occupied himself especially 

 with the problems of systematic Greek grammar in any of its aspects 

 during his residence at the universities of Gottingen, Bonn, and Ber- 

 lin ; but the " Moods and Tenses " is itself a witness to the quicken- 

 ing spirit exercised by European masters upon the American philolo- 

 gists who, about the middle of the last century, began to cross the 

 ocean in search of the inspiration they could not find at home. Yet 

 the work, alike in its first form and when rewritten and greatly en- 

 larged thirty years afterwards, owes relatively little to European 

 research for its essential distinction. Not that Goodwin was not 

 indebted, as he himself gladly acknowledged, to the labors of the 

 great Danish scholar Madvig, or that some of his positions had not 

 already been occupied by German syntacticians. But at the very 

 outset of his career he had learned to think for himself — " Librum 

 aperi, ut discas quid alii cogitaverint ; librum claude, ut ipse cogites." 

 It was due to his native and trained sense and knowledge of language 

 as the instrument of the most delicate and refined expression that 

 he was enabled to safeguard the subject of the modal and temporal 

 relations of the Greek verb from the twofold danger that menaced 

 it at the time. On the one hand, metaphysical subtlety exercised a 

 malign influence in disturbing a clear understanding of the facts 

 and their interpretation ; on the other hand, comparative grammar, 

 a science at that time in its infancy, by the very width of its horizon 

 and the insecurity of its basis, threatened to carry back to the primi- 



