Beck left the Round Hill School in 1830, to take part in establishing another boys’ school, in Phillipstown, on the Hudson River opposite West Point. Two years later he was elected “University Professor of Latin, and Permanent Tutor,” in Harvard University, and for eighteen years discharged the duties of that position in a manner which won the respect and affectionate regard of pupils and colleagues. Upon resigning his chair, and until his death, which occurred suddenly on March 19, 1866, he was occupied with literary pursuits and classical studies, and also held various offices of public trust, representing Cambridge for two years in the State Legislature.[205] Bancroft, too, had withdrawn from the school at Northampton in 1830.[206] For some years longer, in the face of financial losses and in spite of failing health, Cogswell struggled to maintain its efficiency. In the spring of 1834 he finally gave up the attempt, and after two years at the head of a boys’ school near Raleigh, North Carolina, turned his back forever on a profession in which he had been in many ways singularly successful. Follen, as we have seen, resigned his position at the Boston gymnasium early in the summer of 1827; the title “Superintendent of the Gymnasium” at Harvard is given him only in the catalogue for 1827-1828, which also contains the last reference to “gymnastick exercises.” August 21, 1828, the Corporation of Harvard College appointed him “Instructor in Ethics and in Civil and Ecclesiastical History” in the Theological School, in addition to his work in the College. Two years later he received a five-year appointment as Professor of the German Language and Literature, three friends having guaranteed a portion of his salary for that period. The professorship was not renewed in 1835, and his connection with the University came to an end. In the summer of 1833 he became interested in the Anti-slavery Society which had been formed the year previous in Boston, and soon joined it, assisting later in the formation of a similar society in Cambridge, and at one time serving as a manager of the Massachusetts Society. As early as the winter of 1826-1827 he formed the acquaintance of Dr. William Ellery Channing, and decided to prepare himself for the ministry with the assistance of that distinguished Unitarian clergyman. On January 13, 1840, three days after completing a well-attended course of six lectures on German literature under the auspices of the Merchants’ Library Association of New York, he left that city for Boston on the steamboat “Lexington.” About fifty miles out, on the Sound, the vessel caught fire, and Follen, together with all but four of the crew and passengers, met his death. Charles Sumner, who had been his pupil, wrote to a friend “Dr. Follen is gone; able, virtuous, learned, good, with a heart throbbing to all that is honest and humane;” and Dr. Channing “said of him that he was, on the whole, the best man he had ever known.”[207]