Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[170]

XX

‘Make Thy Option which of two’

who does not look back with some slight envy to the period when Professor Popkin could dwell with longing on that coming day when he could retire from his Harvard Professorship of Greek and ‘read the authors’? He actually resigned in 1833, and had for nearly twenty years the felicity for which he longed. What he meant by reading the authors was well enough exhibited in that contemporary English clergyman, described in Hogg's ‘Life of Shelley,’ who devoted all his waking hours for thirty years to a regular course of Greek writers. He arranged them in a three years course, and when they were ended he began again. The only exception was in case of Homer, whose works he read every year for a month at the seashore—‘the proper place to read Homer,’ he said; and, as he also pointed out, there were twenty-four week-days in a