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[298]
in his clear intellect and severe taste.
Before I had come to know him well, I asked Theodore Parker whether he did not consider Dr. Hedge a very learned man. He replied, ‘Hedge is learned in spots.’
Parker's idea of learning was of the encyclopaedic kind.
He wanted to know everything about everything; his reading and research had no limits but those of his own strength, and for many years he was able to set these at naught.
He was wonderfully well informed in many directions, and his depth of thought enabled him to make his multifarious knowledge available for the great work which was the joy of his life.
Yet I remember that even he, on one occasion, spoke of the cinnerian matter of the brain, usually termed the cineritious. Horace Mann, who was present, corrected this, and said, ‘Parker, that is the first mistake I ever heard you make.’
Parker seemed a little annoyed at this small slip.
I heard a second Phi Beta discourse from Dr. Hedge some time in the sixties.
I remember of it that he compared the personal and petty discipline of Harvard College with the independent regime of the German universities, which he greatly preferred.
He also said, quite distinctly, that he considered the study of German literature to-day more important than that of the Greek classics.
This was a liberal theologian's point
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