Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2Hoar, George Frisbie
History
Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2
Hoar, George Frisbie
United States -- History -- 1865-1921; United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1900
"After her marriage, when her husband, the well-known clergyman
of Waltham, received boys in his house to be fitted for college,
she assumed the advanced instruction in Greek and Latin, and
did not fail to turn it to account by extending her studies
in both languages. It soon happened that students from Cambridge
were put under her private instruction and oversight. If
the young men shared her delight in the book, she was interested
at once to lead them to higher steps and more difficult but
not less engaging authors, and they soon learned to prize
the new world of thought and history thus opened. Her best
pupils became her lasting friends. She became one of the
best Greek scholars in the country, and continued, in her
latest years, the habit of reading Homer, the tragedians,
and Plato. But her studies took a wide range in mathematics,
in natural philosophy, in psychology, in theology, as well
as in ancient and modern literature. She had always a keen
ear open to whatever new facts astronomy, chemistry, of the
theories of light and heat had to furnish. Any knowledge,
all knowledge was welcome. Her stores increased day by day.
She was absolutely without pedantry. Nobody ever heard of
her learning until a necessity came for its use, and then
nothing could be more simple than her solution of the problem
proposed to her. The most intellectual gladly conversed with
one whose knowledge, however rich and varied, was always with
her only the means of new acquisition. Meantime her mind
was purely receptive. She had no ambition to propound a theory,
or to write her own name on any book, or plant, or opinion.
Her delight in books was not tainted by any wish to shine,
or any appetite for praise or influence. She seldom and unwillingly
used a pen, and only for necessity or affection.
"But this wide and successful study was, during all the hours
of middle life, only the work of hours stolen from sleep,
or was combined with some household task which occupied the
hands and left the eyes free. She was faithful to all the
duties of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminently
hospitable household, wherein she was dearly loved, and where
'her heart
Life's lowliest duties on itself did lay.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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