ctuate,--the annual losses
not always being met by corresponding gains,--was then in a high state
of efficiency. For the sake of study and musical acquisition, it
boldly grappled with the difficult works of eminent masters, and with
whatever necessary imperfectness of actual performance, it was with
sure and lasting results of musical ability and taste and knowledge.
It was in this society, I suppose, that Professor Putnam first became
practically acquainted with some of the great works of Handel and
Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart, and with the lighter but yet substantial
excellencies of some of the English masters. Here he cultivated and
disciplined his nice ear to the instinctive perception of the hidden
harmonies of poetry, to the _feeling_ of those finer beauties which
hardly admit of expression in anything so clumsy as our actual speech.

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,--