There are moments in life that are never forgot
Which brighten, and brighten, as time steals away;
They give a new charm to the happiest lot,
And they shine on the gloom of the loneliest day.
These moments are hallowed by smiles and by tears,
The first look of love and the last parting given.
- Percival[1]
[1] In a
July 27, 1897 article in The Wisconsin
Sentinel, John Burton memorializes James Gates Percival:
A
man who has left perhaps a more abiding literary fame than almost any other
Wisconsin writer is hardly known and remembered by many people of the
state. The man was poet, geologist,
musician and linguist, and was by merit a success in all these departments of
literature and art. Brilliant as a boy;
spelling and reading by the age of 5; a thoughtful writer at the age of 14;
graduated at the head of his class in Yale college at the age of 20; an author
of prominence at the age of 25; a friend and associate of Noah Webster at the
age of 30; instrumental in preparing the scientific words for the first edition
of the Webster Dictionary at the age of 33; at 39 the state geologist of
Connecticut, a position which he honored for seven years; and state geologist
of Wisconsin from ’54 to ’56, in which position he died in the little town of
Hazel Green in the year 1856, at the age of 61 years. This, in a word, is the record of James Gates
Percival. Upon his plain and modest tomb
are engraved these words:
Eminent as a poet
Rarely accomplished as a linguist,
Learned and acute in science
A man without guile
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