James J. Blaisdell. 
519 
tions of mind and matter. He loved to soar on strong wings 
into spiritual ranges of thought and feeling, and lift with him 
the thought of others. He could well have said 
1 ‘ I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.” 
As a teacher Professor Blaisdell has had a marked place in the 
life and history of Wisconsin. For thirty-seven years he has 
been an instructor of young men in this state, and by voice 
and pen in wider circles. He was not a conventional teacher. 
He was not in some respects a modern teacher. He had little 
interest personally in the laboratory method of teaching. He 
shrunk from it with a sense that somehow it reduced study to a 
mechanical or dead thing. I have thought that he gave too lit¬ 
tle weight and value to certain current methods. But in his 
own method he was easily a master. With him every pupil 
was an individual, spiritual personality. And while he believed 
profoundly the things he taught, he used these truths not for 
their own sake so much as for the developing power there 
might be in them for the minds with which and upon which 
he worked. He sought to know each individual student inti¬ 
mately, in his modes of thought, in his modes of living. 
He was not content unless he could in some genuine way come 
into personal, vital, throbbing touch with each pupil. This 
attempt of his, instinctive and deliberate, was almost always 
crowned with a remarkable degree of success. His students he 
grappled to himself with hooks of steel. Men would look for¬ 
ward for years to reaching that part of their course where they 
would come under his influence, and they went forth from the 
college impressed with his personality, molded by his thinking, 
and yet empowered by him in a remarkable degree to be in¬ 
dividual thinkers and actors in a living world. It was this 
that made him what I may term the Thomas Arnold of Wis- 
