Thomas Lounsbury

January 1, 1838 (age 77)

Around 1960 Lounsbury moved to New York City where he occupied himself writing for Appleton's New American Cyclopedia. On August 9, 1862, he joined the Union army as first lieutenant of Company C in the 126th New York Regiment. His first adventures in the field terminated ingloriously at Harpers Ferry, where he was surrendered with nine thousand other men to General Jackson, by what he characterized as "an imbecility so hopelessly imbecile, as almost to reach the sublime in that department". He was exchanged in November and was on active service in Virginia until the close of the Gettysburg campaign. His impressions of Virginia in war time are recorded in a paper written in 1864 and subsequently published under the title, "In the Defenses of Washington". His regiment suffered heavily in the battle of Gettysburg, and he was one of seven officers who escaped uninjured. In August 1863 he was detailed to Elmira, New York, as adjutant-general of the draft rendezvous; and here he remained until mustered out of service in June 1865. He taught Latin and Greek for some months in Lespinasse's French Institute on Washington Heights, New York, and was tutor in a private family at Milburn, New Jersey, for two years. During this period he pursued a rigorous course of reading and study, with particular attention to Anglo-Saxon and early English. In January 1870 he returned to Yale as instructor in English in the Sheffield Scientific School. In 1871 he was made professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School, and he continued to hold this chair until 1906. He was librarian of the Scientific School from 1873 to 1896, its representative on the university council from 1900 until the year of his retirement, and for many years a member of the standing committee in charge of the university library. In teaching English literature in a scientific school, Lounsbury was more happily situated than might at first appear. Sheffield was still a new enterprise when he joined the faculty, and he had more freedom to deal imaginatively with a subject still under some suspicion than he would have had in an institution bound by the old academic traditions. He broke away from the formal teaching of rhetoric, took his students straight to the texts of the poets and prose writers, and taught them to recognize in literature the record of a life as real as their own. The principal interests of most of his students lay naturally in other directions, but he succeeded in making literature a permanent interest with a surprisingly large number of them. He brought to his classroom the hard common sense, the firm regard for fact, and the unshakable sense of values that distinguished his own scholarship; and the first object of his teaching was to assure himself that his pupils knew what they were talking about. Evidence that he was able to view with the same sardonic amusement the teacher's inevitable failure to hold the attention of his pupils at all times and seasons is to be found in the oft-told tale that he once exhorted a class, growing unusually restless toward the end of the hour, to bear with him a little longer, for he had a few more pearls to cast. His first book, an edition of Chaucer's Parlament of Foules (1877), was followed by a History of the English Language (1879, 1894, 1907), and James Fenimore Cooper (1882). In 1892 he published his Studies in Chaucer. Three volumes upon Shakespeare, grouped under the title Shakespearean Wars were published between 1901 and 1906. An increasing interest in questions of spelling, pronunciation, and usage manifested itself in a number of articles in the magazines, which were subsequently collected in book form under the titles The Standard of Pronunciation in English (1904), The Standard of Usage in English (1908), and English Spelling and Spelling Reform (1909). In April 1907 he was elected president of the Simplified Spelling Board. Four lectures delivered at the University of Virginia were published in 1911 under the title The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning; and The Yale Book of American Verse, an unusual anthology with a striking preface, appeared in 1912. His last work was left unfinished at his death and was published in the autumn of 1915 by Wilbur L. Cross, with the title The Life and Times of Tennyson from 1809 to 1850. Lounsbury's style is pungent, forthright, and voluble. His books are entirely free from the affectation and arrogance of pedantry, and although they are sometimes too diffuse, their vitality is unfailing.

Back to Profile

Photos
Works

book

A Scholar of the Twelfth Century (Classic Reprint)

(Excerpt from A Scholar of the Twelfth Century It is hard...)

Excerpt from A Scholar of the Twelfth Century It is hard for us to realize that this should be so. In the broad glare of light cast by the press of modern times upon the words and acts of the most inconspicuous in these days, in particular, when no privacy, however secluded. No obscurity, however pro found, can be trusted to save any one from the reporter that walks in darkness, or the interviewer that wastes at noon-day, it scarcely seems possible that the life of any man of great emi nence could escape being known to contemporaries and handed down to posterity. Yet this will not appear so strange when we come to consider how little is the acquaintance most of us have with the details that make up the biography of the most conspicuous living men of letters. How many of the admirers of Tennyson, for instance, who for thirty years has occupied the foremost place in English literature, could give any but vague and fragmentary particulars of his personal history? But however it may be at present, obviously the only cer tain way for a man of the past to make sure that his acts would be perpetuated was for him to write an account of them himself. Simple as the expedient may appear, it took ages to discover it. Antiquity seems to have known nothing of auto biography, strictly so called. In works like the Commentaries of Caesar, the personal interest belonging to the man is entirely swallowed up in the more absorbing interest of the events he describes. The former is, indeed, so subordinate to the latter that it can scarcely be said to exist at all. In the genuine auto biography the man himself must be the center about which everything else revolves: and events that take place in his time are described only as they impart additional interest to his own words or deeds. The practice is now so common that it seems to us as if it must always have existed. Yet the work of which a slight account is to be given here, is perhaps one of the earliest of its kind known to literary history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.