Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[460] of Marcus Aurelius (1826) and of Epictetus (1877). Upon his recall in 1828 to the chair of Greek at the newly established University College, London, he named as his successor his pupil Gessner Harrison (1807-62), with whom he remained in correspondence and to whom he sent copies of the earlier portions of Bopp's Comparative grammar as they appeared from 1833 onward. Harrison thereupon applied the comparative method to his own studies and teaching long before it had been practised elsewhere in America, or in England, or had been generally accepted even in Germany

Among classical scholars in America as elsewhere two types are distinguishable; the one indulging its aesthetic appreciation, historical and archaeological associations, and a philosophical discursiveness about the ancients, and the reconstitution of antiquity as a whole—Boeckh's ideal of Altertumswissenschaft; the other inclining towards minute grammatical, textual, and metrical investigations—the ideals rather of Hermann and Curtius. Two scholars of the first type are Cornelius Conway Felton and Theodore Dwight Woolsey.

Felton (1807-62), like Harrison, his exact contemporary, received all his training in this country. Seven years after his graduation from Harvard he became in 1834 Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, made his first journey abroad in 1853-54, spending several months in Greece, and became president of Harvard two years before his death. The close friend of Longfellow, Felton, was a genial soul, enthusiastic for antiquity, who rather deprecated minute grammatical study and overmuch concern with choric metres and textual readings and emendations. These things he thought dried up the springs of human feeling in the student. He favoured instead the appreciative study of ancient and modern literatures together, paralleling Aeschylus with Shakespeare and Milton, comparing Sophocles and Euripides with Alfieri, Schiller, and Goethe, and contrasting Greek with French drama. He published (1834) Wolf's text of the Iliad with Flaxman's illustrations and his own notes; and made college editions of The Clouds, The birds, and the Agamemnon, and of the Panegyricus of Isocrates. The fruits of his journey were his Selections from modern Greek writers (1856) and several series of Lowell Institute lectures, published posthumously as Greece, ancient and modern.