or act or look, a consciousness of
his superiority to the poorest scholar in the class.

"Oblivious as he was, apparently, of the deficiencies of others, he
was quick enough to perceive their merits. A fine recitation or an
eminently creditable performance of any college exercise, no matter by
whom, gave him positive enjoyment, which in his nervous and emphatic
way he was very apt to express. It is really not too much to say that
he appeared to enjoy the successes of others as much as though they
had been his own.

"What a help to any college class is the influence of one such man!
His connection with the class of 1843, was, no doubt, the presentation
to some of its members of an ideal such as they had not formed before;
an ideal, not only of enthusiasm for the largest acquisitions and the
finest culture, but of that enthusiasm sustained by the love of
excellence for its own sake, and not alloyed by any merely selfish
ambition to surpass others.

"A spirit of scholarship so high, so broad, so generous as this could
be no mark for envy. None of us grudged our classmate his position or
his honors. He was the beloved associate, and is now the warmly
remembered friend of some of us, and no doubt many of us were more
indebted to his example than we were aware of at the time for anything
that was well and worthily done by us in our college days.

"I ought not to close this notice without speaking of Mr. Putnam's
love of music. Music was born in him as much as Greek was, and he
learned one as rapidly as he did the other. When in college he was a
valuable member of the Handel Society, his influence being always in
favor of the introduction for practice of the standard and classic
authors. Haydn's 'Creation' and other works of that great composer
were an unfailing source of delight to him. Their naturalness and
spontaneity, their brightness and cheerfulness, their artistic finish
and exquisite grace, met precisely the corresponding qualities in his
own mind. As we often choose those authors who are most unlike
ourselves, so he knew how to enjoy the rugged grandeur of less
polished writers. He could listen to a mountain chain of choruses in
'Israel in Egypt,' or to a dark and mazy labyrinth of mingled harmony
and discord in Beethoven, and wherever he saw the perfection of art or
the power of genius, his soul was like a harp of a thousand strings
every one of which was alive with vibration. I well remember with what
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