Cambridge (Mass.) -- Biography; United States -- Biography
Professor Child talked freely in regard to the meetings of the college
faculty, for he believed that graduates had a right to know about them.
He quoted some amusing anecdotes of a certain professor who led the
opposition against President Eliot and praised the dignified manner with
which Eliot regarded him. In 1879 he said one day:
"We are in the half-way stage between a college and a university, and
there is consequently great confusion. If we once became a university,
pure and simple, all that would be over; but the difficulty is that the
material which comes to us is so poor. I do not mean that the young men
are lacking in intelligence, but the great majority of them do not brace
themselves to the work. As Doctor Hedge says, the heart of the college is
in the boating and ball-playing and not in its studies."
His third occupation and chief recreation was his rose-garden. The whole
space between his front piazza and Kirkland Street was filled with rose-
bushes which he tended himself, from the first loosening of the earth in
spring until the straw sheaf-caps were tied about them in November. What
more delightful occupation for a scholar than working in a rose-garden!
There his friends were most likely to find him in suitable weather, and
when June came they were sure to receive a share of the bountiful
blossoms; nor did he ever forget the sick and suffering.
He was greatly interested to hear of a German doctor at Munich who had a
rose-garden with more than a hundred varieties in it. "I should like to
know that man," he said; "wouldn't we have a good talk together?" He
complained that although everybody liked roses few were sufficiently
interested in them to distinguish the different kinds. Naturally rose-
bugs were his special detestation. "Saving your presence," he said to
President Felton's daughter, "I will crush this insect;" to which she
aptly replied, "I certainly would not have my presence save him." When he
heard of the Buffalo-bug he exclaimed: "Are we going to have another pest
to contend with? I think it is a serious question whether the insect
world is not going to get the better of us."
After his painful death at the Massachusetts Hospital in September, 1896,
the president and fellows of the university voted to set apart little
Holden Chapel, the oldest building on the college grounds, and yet one of
the most dignified, for an English library dedicated to the memory of
Francis J. Child. Such an honor had never been decreed for president or
professor before; and it gives him the distinction that we all feel he
deserved. It is much more appropriate to him, and satisfactory than a
marble statue in Saunders Theatre would have been, or a stained-glass
window in Memorial Hall. Yet his presence still lingers in the memory of
his friends, like the fragrance of his own roses, after the petals have
fallen from their stems.
LONGFELLOW
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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