Laudator Temporis Acti

Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1936), pp. 175-177:

A Boston man had to be learned in something, and the passion for learning on the upper levels soon spread through all the other strata. Harvard set the pace. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was not unique as one who, at the time of his graduation, read French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek, who later acquired German and Portuguese, Hebrew, a little Swedish, and always hoped for a chance to study Russian. Theodore Parker, the minister, somewhat older, the Roxbury Friar Tuck, the Lexington farmer's son who was able to carry a full barrel of cider, read Dutch, Danish and Russian, along with the others, Coptic, Chaldaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and was found by one of his friends deep in a grammar of Mpongwe.* Here and there, some workman followed suit. Elihu Burritt of Worcester, the "learned blacksmith," was a typical figure of the moment. This well-known self-taught linguist who, as an apprentice, had kept a Greek grammar in the crown of his hat to study while he was casting brass cow-bells, who made a version of Longfellow in Sanskrit and mastered more than forty other tongues, toiling at the forge or in the evening, after a full day's work, affected no singularity, as he said. His aim was "to stand in the ranks of the workingmen of New England and beckon them onward and upward to the full stature of intellectual men." The noble-hearted Burritt† was not the only man of his kind. Many a boy walked thirty miles to Cambridge to feast his eyes on the sight of the college; and many a farmer's son, like Burritt, might have walked to Boston, a hundred and twenty miles, from New Britain, with two or three dollars and a silver watch tucked away in a handkerchief, hoping to catch a ship for India, where he could study Sanskrit. Sir Charles Lyell and Agassiz were surprised, when they arrived in Boston in the forties, by the universal interest in education. Lyell had never seen such crowds of workmen listening on winter nights to learned lectures on geology and zoology, Shakespeare and Milton. Agassiz was present at an assembly of three thousand mechanics, brought together to form a library and listening for two hours with rapt attention to a lecture on the advantages of reading. Dickens was impressed by the interests of the factory-girls of Lowell, a public that he knew so well in England. There were joint-stock pianos in their boarding-houses; the walls of the mills were covered with their poems; they subscribed to the British reviews; they had classes in German; they all seemed to know Paradise Lost by heart and talked about Wordsworth, Coleridge and Macaulay in the intervals of changing bobbins on the looms. [...] The fame of the Lowell Offering, which contained their writings,—humorous and pathetic tales, fairy-stories, poems,—travelled round the world.

* Theodore Parker's learning was famous in New England. T. W. Higginson related that he wished to find a certain reference in the Salic, Burgundian and Ripuarian codes before the codification of Charlemagne. Neither Sumner, Justice Gray nor Chief Justice Shaw could assist him on this occasion, but Sumner said, "Try Parker." Parker said at once, "Go to the Harvard Library, and on the fifth shelf in the fourth left-hand alcove you will find a small, thick quarto entitled 'Potgeiser: de Statu Servorum,' which will give you all the information you want." Higginson found his question answered there.—Chadwick, Theodore Parker.

† A passage from Elihu Burritt's diary, 1837: "Monday, June 18, headache; forty pages Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, sixty four pages French, eleven hours forging. Tuesday, sixty-five lines Hebrew, thirty pages of French, ten pages Cuvier's Theory, eight lines Syriac, ten ditto Danish, ten ditto Bohemian, nine ditto Polish, fifteen names of stars, ten hours forging. Wednesday, twenty-five lines Hebrew, fifty pages of astronomy, eleven hours forging. Thursday, fifty-five lines Hebrew, eight ditto Syriac, eleven hours forging. Friday, unwell, twelve hours forging," etc.

Hat tip: Peter Mottola.