The Life and Writings of William Law Symonds

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: monly abides in one place; his companions are books; his deeds are the records of processes of thought; his experiences are the emotions that move upon the theatre of his mind. The biographer of a scholar, accordingly, has but little to tell of actions, incidents, and events. William Law Symonds, whom I...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: monly abides in one place; his companions are books; his deeds are the records of processes of thought; his experiences are the emotions that move upon the theatre of his mind. The biographer of a scholar, accordingly, has but little to tell of actions, incidents, and events. William Law Symonds, whom I had the honour and the happiness to know, as long ago as 1860, impressed me then, ?and the impression has remained unchanged, except that it has been deepened by a careful study of his writings, ?as a mystic, a perfect type of the spiritualized intellect. He was then in his twenty-seventh year, a slight, gentle person; modest; reticent; calmly observant; not austere, and yet, even among jovial companions, isolated and alone. He sometimes joined a group of Bohemian comrades of which I was a member, and his presence in our favorite resort was always a pleasure: but, while kindly and sympathetic in demeanor, he seldom spoke and he was never ostentatious. It was in 1860 that he contributed to the New York Saturday Press, of which Henry Clapp was editor, his essay on Buckle's Philosophy, and among his friends and acquaintances at that time were Edward Howland, in later years notable as a socialist (he established a colony at Sinaloa, Mexico); George Arnold, the poet; the brilliant critic, John R. G. Hassard; Robert Carter, conspicuous in the journalism of that period; Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley. He was then employed as a writer for Appleton's American Cyclopaedia, to which he contributed about 2,600 articles, and in the exacting and poorly paid service of which he worked himself to death. I did not know him intimately, but I knew him well enough to know that he possessed more learning than was possessed by any of our Bohemian acquaintances, a more potent and subtle faculty of anal.