Charles was born on May 28, 1821 in Haverhill, Massachussets, United States, the second of the twelve children of Charles and Rebecca (George) Short, and the seventh in descent from Henry Short, who emigrated to Ipswich in 1634 and later removed to Newbury.
At Phillips Academy, Andover, 1837-40, he studied Greek and Latin with passionate ardor. "I used to open my eyes very early in the morning, " he said later, "waiting impatiently for daylight, that I might rise and be at my books". Once, when neither his teachers nor the available books could satisfy him as to a difficult passage in a Greek author, he tramped the twenty miles to Cambridge to settle the matter in the Harvard library.
Later he entered Harvard College in 1842 and graduated fourth in the famous class of 1846. While a sophomore he translated into Greek hexameters of H. H. Milman's "The Belvidere Apollo. " He tarried a year at Cambridge as a pupil of Prof. Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles.
Short became an assistant master at his old school in 1847, was headmaster of the Roxbury Latin School, 1848-53, and conducted a school of his own in Philadelphia, 1853-63.
In 1860 he visited England; he went to Europe again in 1881 and in 1884. In 1862 he and his wife were confirmed in the Episcopal Church in the first class presented by Phillips Brooks. A year later, several clergymen having declined, he was elected to the presidency of Kenyon College, at Gambier, Ohio, in succession to the late Lorin Andrews. He retained the strong faculty that his predecessor had gathered, but in 1867, as the result of squabbles among the teachers and trustees, he resigned.
Almost immediately he was called to succeed Henry Drisler as professor of Latin in Columbia College, New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. On its organization in 1872 he was made a member of the American Committee on the Revision of the English Authorized Version of the Bible, to serve in the New Testament Company. He was the author of the letter a in Harper's Latin Dictionary (1879); and the minute textual study, "The New Revision of King James' Revision of the New Testament, as Illustrated by the Gospel of St. Matthew".
He died at his home in New York.
Charles Short acquired renown by a translation into Greek hexameters of H. H. Milman's "The Belvidere Apollo. " Being the president of Kenyon College, he made the beginnings of a college library, and attracted worthy students to the institution. Of his scholarly productions the most notable were the monograph on "The Order of Words in Attic Greek Prose, " prefixed to Drisler's edition of Charles D. Yonge's An English-Greek Lexicon (1870).
He was an able teacher and lecturer.
Quotes from others about the person
Brander Matthews described Short as "a man of many amusing peculiarities, but possessed of real learning and inspired by a genuine love of letters".
In 1849 he married Anne Jean, daughter of Elihu Lyman of Greenfield, Massachussets, who with three sons and a daughter survived him.
