A Geographical View of the World, Embracing the Manners, Customs, and Pursuits, of Every Nation;
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James Gates Percival was an American poet and geologist.
Background
He was born on September 15, 1795 in Kensington, Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, the son of Dr. James and Elizabeth (Hart) Percival.
On the paternal side he was descended from James Percival, who settled in Sandwich, Massachussets, in 1670. His mother, descended from Stephen Hart, one of the Hartford proprietors, had a sensitive, nervous temperament and was inclined to melancholy, a trait transmitted to her sons, Edwin, a painter, and James.
Education
He was sent to private school. Later he studied at Yale university, for the graduation exercises in 1815 he wrote and took part in a tragedy, later published under the title "Zamor. " In 1819 he transferred to the Medical Institution of Yale College and graduated with distinction in 1820.
Career
After studies he vacillated between teaching and the professions of law and medicine, finally entering the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1818.
After a brief interval of practice in his native village, he closed his office. Rejection of a marriage proffer and failure to win a lucrative clientele drove him to attempt suicide; but in the same year the publication of several of his poems in The Microscope, a New Haven magazine, prompted him to attempt a career as a poet. Into Poems (1821) he emptied his portfolio, with the result that his long, Spenserian "Prometheus" was acclaimed the equal of Byron's Childe Harold, and his poetic gifts hailed as the most classical in America. The appearance of Clio I and II (1822), collections of weak lyrics, and of Prometheus Part II with Other Poems (1822) did not alter his reputation. Many of his poems were pleas for Greek freedom.
For brief periods he edited the Connecticut Herald, a New Haven newspaper, taught chemistry at West Point, and served as surgeon in the Boston recruiting office. These positions he resigned because of fancied unjust treatment. His sudden withdrawal as the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poet in 1824, his petulance as Phi Beta Kappa orator at Yale in 1825, and his resignation as editor of George Bond's American Athenæum (New York) in August 1825 aroused a storm of newspaper disapproval, in consequence of which he withdrew from his literary career, publishing only Clio No. III (1827), dreamhaunted soliloquies, and The Dream of a Day, and Other Poems (1843), metrical experiments and translations.
While editing Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (1825) and Malte-Brun's System of Universal Geography (1827 - 34), he began a systematic study of languages, translating from a dozen poetic literatures. By reason of his linguistic attainments, he was employed in 1827-28 to assist Noah Webster in revising the manuscript and reading the proof of An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).
In 1835 he was appointed state geologist of Connecticut. After presenting two reports (1836 and 1838), which he stipulated must not be published, he planned a comprehensive natural history survey of the state. Gov. William W. Ellsworth refused to credit his seriousness and in 1838 blocked a further grant of funds. After vainly attempting to have appropriations renewed, Percival presented "a hasty outline" of his bulky materials in the Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut (1842).
Poverty-stricken as a result of his unpaid work as geologist and his lavish purchase of books, he took quarters in the State Hospital, New Haven, where he lived as a recluse, engaged occasionally during the next ten years as a railroad surveyor and geologist. For the American Mining Company, between 1851 and 1854 he surveyed the lead-mining district of Illinois and Wisconsin, and in the latter year he was appointed state geologist of Wisconsin.
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Personality
He was a versatile, man, with a facility in writing verse on all manner of subjects. Unyielding and eccentric, utterly impractical and living alone with his ten thousand books, he was one of the most learned men of his time.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Atlantic Monthly, Percival was "an inexhaustible, undemonstrative, noiseless, passionless man. .. impressing you, for the most part, as a creature of pure intellect".