TIMOTHY DWIGHT (1752-1817)

For a generation Timothy Dwight was the representative New Englander just as Cotton Mather had been at an earlier day and Jonathan Edwards had been a century later. Scholar, theologian, preacher, college president, dominating personality, poet,-in every way he was what Dr. Holmes later was to call a leader of the New England Brahmin caste.' He was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, a town associated with the name of Edwards, and his mother was a daughter of that great divine. No child was ever more precocious: he was reading Latin at six, and he could have entered Yale at eight, but was held back until he was thirteen. At seventeen he was graduated with distinction and at nineteen he entered upon a six years' tutorship in the college. In 1771, the year of Freneau's Rising Glory of America, he began upon a ponderous epic in Heroic couplets, The Conquest of Canaan, founded upon the wars of Joshua. It was three years before he completed it and it was not until 1785 that it appeared in print to be reviewed in extenso by the poet Cowper. In 1777 he resigned as tutor to enter the continental army as a chaplain. During the year that he was with the troops he wrote the resonant, though somewhat overornate, lyric Columbia,' which must be classed as his best poetic effort. His Greenfield Hill, much admired in its day, a poem designed, in its author's words, to imitate the manner of several British Poets,' appeared in 1794.

In 1795 Dwight accepted the presidency of Yale, a position which he filled with distinction during the rest of his life. Among theologians he is known for his Theology Explained and Defended, five volumes of doctrinal sermons preached before his students. One other book, Travels in New England and New York, a record of leisurely journeys during vacation periods, was published after his death. Had the author dared to forget himself and to descend from the stately eminence of his eighteenth century self-consciousness the book might have become a classic. As it is, it is seldom opened by modern readers. An illuminating treatment of Dwight may be found in Moses Coit Tyler's Three Men of Letters, 1895.