Robert Herrick: Novelist and Educator P1

PASSAGE 1

The novelist Robert Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 26, 1868. His oldest American ancestor, a nephew of the author of Hesperides, had settled at Salem in 1638; he was related to the Hales, the Mannings, the Hawthornes, and the Peabodys; his immediate forebears were lawyers, teachers, and clergymen.

At Harvard, he was a contemporary of Santayana. William Vaughn Moody,Norman Hpgood, and Robert Morss Lovett; he nearly wrecked the Harvard Monthly when he sullied its chaste pages with the first English translation of lbsen's ludy from the Sea. His teaching began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but William Rainey Harper lured him to the new University of Chicago, where he remained officially for exactly a generation and where his students in advanced composition found him terrifyingly frigid in the classroom but sympathetic and understanding in their personal conferences. During his later years the spot of earth dearest to his heart was York Viliage, Maine, but after his retirement from teaching he brought his career to a rather amazing close as government secretary of the Virgin islands, He died at St. Thomas on December 23, 1938.