The desire for physical accomplishment led him to join a military company then existing in college, although he had no love for such things, but rather a native repugnance to them, and there was then no special demand for the discipline. The six years following his graduation were divided between instruction in Leicester, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, and pursuing his professional studies in the Theological Seminary at Andover. During this time he reviewed and consolidated his knowledge. He brought himself into nearer contact with practical and common life. He enlarged his sphere of observation and the circle of his studies, and was looking forward with great satisfaction to the actual performance of the duties of his profession, when he was invited to the chair of Greek in this college. It was a position entirely suited to his tastes, his capacities, his studies. He brought to it not only ample learning and tastes delicate and cultivated, but the enlarged and generous spirit of a true scholar, and the aptness of an accomplished instructor. His ideal of attainment and of duty was very high, and he aimed at once to fit himself, by the most generous courses of study, to illustrate the more perfectly to his classes the poetry, the eloquence, the philosophy, of the wisest and most refined people of the whole ancient world. It was with no narrow or exclusive spirit, nor with a merely technical purpose, that Professor Putnam pursued his studies, or directed those of others. Every true book was a nucleus around which all thought and knowledge of similar kind were grouped,--a central point from which his mind radiated in all directions within the sphere of the subject. Could he read Plato and Aristotle without studying the course of ancient philosophy and its influence on the modern? or Demosthenes, without an investigation of the virtues and failings of Athenian statesmen? or Thucydides, without meditation on the causes of the desolation of empires and states? or Homer and Sophocles, without a quick comparison with Dante and Milton and Shakespeare? It was indeed a characteristic of Professor Putnam, and one cause why his knowledge was becoming, had indeed become, at once so ample and so serviceable, that it was not an accumulation of facts disconnected or bound together by mere accidental associations, but an organic growth, every fibre of the most distant branch tracing itself back to the one trunk, and the sap from the living root feeding and nourishing the whole.