"In Classic Dartmouth's College Halls"

THESE words from John Greenleaf Whittier's Snowbound, A Winter Idyl were written exactly a century ago. The poet's interest in Dartmouth stems from his attendance until he was nineteen at district schools where, he was accustomed to say, only two of the teachers employed in that district were "fit for the not very exacting position they occupied." Both were Dartmouth undergraduates and interesting individuals, as Dartmouth undergraduates often are. But which of the two is described in Snowbound? This query has often been put but never, in my inexpert opinion, satisfactorily answered. Here is my attempt to find the answer.

Whittier's 71 lines (438-509) of tribute to his teacher stress the variety of his abilities as pedler, teacher, violinist, athlete, and most of all as narrator of "...classic legends rare and old, Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome Had all the commonplace of home, And little seemed at best the odds 'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods; Where Pindus-born Arachthus took The guise of any grist-mill brook, And dread Olympus at his will Became a huckleberry hill."

Obviously this is the familiar Dartmouth ideal of the well-rounded individual. It suits very well Joshua Coffin (1792-1864), Dartmouth graduate of 1823 (as of the Class of 1817 because of interruption of his career by bad health). As a teacher Coffin was "affectionate, ardent, fertile in expedient,... always in good humor." In 1838 he was sent on a perilous mission to rescue two free Negroes, kidnapped and held in bondage in the South. His letter, written on board the ship Brazils, December 23, 1838, interests me: "I am now... 218 miles from Memphis ... on my way home. One of the persons I went after, Isaac Wright, is with me. I have in fact kidnapped him into freedom. His gratitude and joy at being delivered are unbounded. We are the happiest fellows alive and it is hard to tell which is the happier, he or I."

Whittier's earlier poem To My OldSchoolmaster, an Epistle not in the Manner of Horace was clearly written about Joshua Coffin. Whittier coyly gives the thing away when he says (lines 64 sq.)

"He who bore thy name of old Midway in the heavens did hold Over Gibeon moon and sun; Thou hast bidden them backward run."

Perhaps then, the poet also had Coffin in mind when he described the teacher in Snowbound.

I am indebted to my esteemed colleague and dear friend, Prof. Howard F. Dunham '11, for calling to my attention his lecture notes from the classes of Prof. Charles F. Richardson '71, whose competence in the minutiae of American literature is beyond dispute. Professor Richardson felt that "the facts seem to indicate Coffin was the teacher in Snowbound." However, he mentions another possibility.

George Haskell of Waterford, Maine, entered Dartmouth in 1823. He left in his sophomore year, studied medicine until 1827, when he received the degree M.D. from Dartmouth. In 1833 he settled in Alton, Ill., and was active in founding Shurtleff College. After a decade of the practice of medicine in Rockford, Ill., he devoted himself for some years to the raising of fruit. He gave to Rockford the land for its Haskell Park. In 1857 Dartmouth gave him the degree A.B. as of the Class of 1827.

In 1824-25 he taught in the district school of East Haverhill, Mass., where it was said of him that "he was a man of scholarship and enthusiasm, a friend of struggling students, many of whom he befriended in his home and with his means." Whittier was undoubedly one of these students, but until the end of his life he could not remember the name of his teacher. However, it is recorded that he remembered that the teacher was from Maine. This seems to me to be reflected in the lines in Snowbound about Whittier's teacher:

"Born the wild northern hills among, From which his yeoman father wrung By patient toil subsistence scant,

Not competence and yet not want, He early gained the power to pay His cheerful, self-reliant way."

This George Haskell is my candidate for Whittier's schoolmaster. As further evidence, I submit a clipping from TheNorway Advertiser, with the masthead BUY OR BORROW A COPY, an injunction which I have long adhered to: "George Haskell, the schoolmaster in Whittier's Snowbound, was a Waterford boy. ..." Norway, my home, is adjacent to George Haskell's home, Waterford, you see.

Mr. Haskell in 1866 moved to New Jersey where he purchased 4000 acres which were laid out as a model community to illustrate his notions of townplanning, including a progressive school. He died in Vineland, N.J., in 1876, apparently unaware that a pupil of his had immortalized him in a poem. He was busy.

It is reported that in college George Haskell could jump clean over a fully set dining room table and juggle six oranges at once. I hope he could and I wouldn't wonder. This anecdote, apocryphal perhaps, strengthens my conviction that George Haskell knew a bit about "Classic Dartmouth's college halls." He probably knew the words on Eleazar Wheelock's gravestone, written in 1810 when George was eleven: "Viator, I, etimitare si poteries" (Traveler, just go on and beat this, if you can).

It astounds me that some of my closest friends keep on believing that Dartmouth's college halls are less Classic than they used to be. Rubbish! Mickey Beard and Gene Ryzewicz et al. are candidates for the degree ARTIUM SACALAUREATUS, walk in the VALE OF TEMPE, sing about GRADUS AD PARNASSUM, gladly serve as members of PALAEOPITUS, read the VOCES CLAMANTIUM in The Dartmouth and fully realize, it strikes me, the implications of devotion to their ALMA MATER.

My former students don't worry me in general, but my friends who insist that Classic Dartmouth is no longer that way do upset me some. Seems to me as if, sometimes, my contemporaries were more "snowbound" than my students. Sorry about that.