An American philologist; born in Woodstock, Vt., March 15, 1801; died in Vallombrosa, Italy, July 23, 1882. A graduate of Dartmouth in 1820, he practiced law in Burlington, Vt., became Member of Congress, 1842–49, minister to Turkey 1849–53, and first minister to the new kingdom of Italy 1861, holding the post until his death, a period of over twenty years. As a diplomatist he had great ability. His services to the study of language, especially the history of his own tongue, give him a distinguished place among American scholars. The “Origin and History of the English Language” remains a standard work. He translated Rask’s “Icelandic Grammar” (1838); and also published “Lectures on the English Language” (1861); an edition of Wedgwood’s “Etymology;” and “The Earth as Modified by Human Action” (1874). A revised edition of his complete works appeared in 1885; his “Life and Letters” compiled by his widow in 1888. A part of his fine library of Scandinavian literature was acquired by the University of Vermont.

Personal

  A savant, and has written an excellent book on the English language. He is a tall, stout, homely-looking man of about fifty-five, redeemed from Yankeeism by his European residence and culture. I like him very much, and his wife is a handsome woman.

  When I recall the career of this eminent scholar, I am impressed with the harmony of his life, as well as of its ending. He left college fired with a desire to acquire knowledge from the study both of books and nature, and whether following the profession of law, or serving his country as a statesman or diplomat, he never varied from his original purpose. He first saw the light in one of the beautiful valleys of Vermont, and he died in an equally beautiful valley among the Apennines, almost within the shadow of the most ancient seats of learning. When in his early prime, his mind reveled among the historical records and wild scenery of Scandinavia; it was then his privilege to travel extensively through the countries bordering on the Mediterranean; and when the shadows of his life were lengthening, Providence gave him a pleasant home under Italian skies, where he died, and where his grave is certain to be visited with love and veneration by thousands of his countrymen in future years.

  It has been my fortune in a varied and adventurous life to make the acquaintance of many distinguished men, and of all I ever knew George P. Marsh was the noblest combination, me judice, of the noblest qualities which distinguish man—inflexible honesty, public and private; the most intelligent and purest patriotism; ideality of the highest as to his service in his official career; generosity and self-sacrifice in his personal relations; quick and liberal appreciation of all good in others, and the most singular modesty in all that concerned himself; unfaltering adherence to truth at any cost; an adamantine recognition of duty which knew no deflection from personal motive; and, binding the whole in the noblest and truest of lives, a sincere religious temperament, in which the extreme of liberality to others was united to the profoundest humility as to himself…. Mr. Marsh could never have been a popular man, except among students. His high, unbending sense of justice; his aversion to and contempt for anything that savored of duplicity, disingenuousness, partiality, or favoritism; his intolerance of anything that resembled corruption, unfitted him for American politics, while the same justice in personal matters, coupled with a singular want of egoistic ambition and rare humility, seemed to prevent that display of personal preferences which contributes so largely to the creation of individual enthusiasm. If anybody loved him, it was for the sake of the truth and the justice he himself so revered; he was so broad in his humanities, so uncompromising in his judgments on his own feelings, so free from vanity of any kind, or ostentation, that he seemed almost impersonal.

  Perhaps the most remarkable feature in Mr. Marsh’s linguistic attainment was his ability to speak and write a language as soon as he could read it fluently. His ear was extremely acute in distinguishing vocal sounds, and his power of reproducing them was not less remarkable. He never lost an opportunity of listening to the conversation of those to whom the language he was studying was native, and always joined in it when possible. His memory, naturally very tenacious, and strengthened by the necessity of trusting to it rather than to his eyes, served him for the rest…. His physical powers were now (1839) in their fullest vigor, and he had little the appearance of a close student. The tall and slender aspect, which his six feet of stature gave him in his early youth, had disappeared in the development of full, strong muscles, and his firm step and erect bearing conveyed the impression of great bodily strength, which, in fact, he possessed. His habitual expression was grave; the firm-set mouth might even be called stern; and his earnest gray eyes always seemed to look through the object they were resting upon. There was, in short, an intense personality about him, which inspired all who knew him with respect, and many who did not know him with something very like fear.

  Mr. Marsh was always an early riser. His working time was between five and nine in the morning. He struck an average when he was a lawyer by sleeping in his office while his partner listened to bores; in the House of Representatives it was a standing pleasantry to predict when J. Q. Adams and G. P. Marsh would go to sleep. He read as fast as another man would turn the leaves of a book, and his habit was to begin in the middle and read both ways. He read many books at once, changing from one to another every hour or so.

  During the later portion of my life at Florence, and subsequently at Rome, Mr. G. P. Marsh and his very charming wife were among our most valued friends for many years…. Mr. Marsh was a man of very large and varied culture. A thorough classical scholar and excellent modern linguist, philology was, perhaps, his most favourite pursuit…. Mr. Marsh died, full of years and honors, at a ripe old age. But the closing scene of his life was remarkable from the locality of it. He had gone to pass the hot season at Vallombrosa, where a comfortable hotel replaces the old forestieria of the monastery, while a school of forestry has been established by the government within its walls. Amid those secular shades the old diplomatist and scholar breathed his last, and could not have done so in a more peaceful spot. But the very inaccessible nature of the place made it a question of some difficulty how the body should be transported in properly decorous fashion to the railway station in the valley below—a difficulty which was solved by the young scholars of the school of forestry, who turned out in a body to have the honor of bearing on their shoulders the remains of the man whose writings had done so much to awaken the government to the necessity of establishing the institution to which they belonged.

  Physically, he represented a more stalwart bit of New England manhood than Bancroft…. His father was a large land-owner, magistrate, and sturdy Puritan. The Puritan sturdiness the son inherited, with many yeoman-like qualities, and quite unusual bookish aptitudes. As a boy he regaled himself with stolen readings of an early Encyclopædia Britannica; nor did he at any age or under any circumstances outgrow an insatiate greed for “knowing things.” He had never any patience with dabblers or with those who “half-knew” things. This touch of portraiture, will, I am sure, be recognized by anyone who ever encountered the stalwart presence and the questioning attitude which always belonged to George P. Marsh…. We know that his appetite for the beautiful, whether in art or nature, never abated; we know that the old Cromwellian Puritanism in him always growled (though under breath) at any invasion upon popular rights; we know that tiaras and mitres always had a pasteboard look to him; we know that courtesy and friendliness and bonhomie always touched him, whether in kings or paupers; we know that he greatly loved to inoculate all open-minded, cultivated American travellers with his own abounding love for Italian art and Italian hopes; we know that the water-flashes of Tivoli or Terni, or all the blues by Capri, never wiped from his memory the summer murmurs of the Queechee at Woodstock, or the play of the steely surface of Champlain, under its backing of Adirondack Mountains.

General

  Mr. Marsh is known as a scholar of profound and various erudition, as a writer of strongly marked individuality and nationality. His sympathies are with the Goths, whose presence he recognizes in whatever is grand and peculiar in the characters of the founders of New England, and in whatever gives promise of her integrity, greatness, and permanence. He is undoubtedly better versed than any American in the fresh and vigorous literature of the north of Europe, and perhaps is so also in that fruit of a new birth of genius and virtue, the Puritan literature of Great Britain, and continental Europe. In the “Goths in New England,” (published in 1836), he has contrasted in a striking manner the characters of the Goths and the Romans, and traced the presence and influence of the former in the origin and growth of this republic; and in a discourse recently delivered before the New England Society of the city of New York, he enters again upon the subject, and points to the growth among us, of the Roman element which is as antagonistical to freedom as it is to Gothicism.

  Mr. Marsh’s articles are admirably solid. His style is his weak point. It is apt to be what I should call “congregational.” But he is much better than usual in the Nation thus far. As an editor, I should find fault with his articles as being too palpably parts of a book. He does not get under way quite rapidly enough for a newspaper. But all he says is worth reading for its matter.

  Prof. Marsh’s two volumes on the English Language entitle him to a prominent place in literature. They are the fruits of original reading and study, and are marked by breadth of view and soundness of judgment.

  Mr. Marsh is an eminent scholar in the northern languages of Europe, and holds a high place among philologists. His principal work, entitled “Lectures on the English Language,” is a treatise of great value, and possesses an unusual degree of interest.

  The subject of it [“Man in Nature”] is the modifications and alterations which this planet has undergone at the hands of man. His subject leads him to consider much at large the denudation of mountains, which has caused and is causing such calamitous mischief in Italy and the south of France. He shows very convincingly and interestingly that the destruction of forests causes not only floods in winter and spring, but drought in summer and autumn. And the efforts which have recently been made in Italy to take some steps towards the reclothing of the mountain-sides have in great measure been due to his work, which has been largely circulated in an Italian translation.

  In 1838 he printed an Icelandic grammar. He collected the rarest books in these northern languages and read them. He also wrote articles about them, and delivered orations—or, at least, an oration, a great one, delivered before the Philomathesian Society of Middlebury, Vermont, in 1843. At that time these languages and literatures, the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, were as remote from common scholarly knowledge as Algonkin or Choctaw. The swarm of German scholars had not yet lighted upon them. Grimm’s knowledge of “Beowulf” was talked of much as Mr. Trumbull’s knowledge of Eliot’s Bible is now. Four or five Englishmen were working with Grimm or after him. The Kembles were lamenting that John Mitchell Kemble was nothing better than the chief of Anglo-Saxonists in England. No one of them was to be compared for a moment with Mr. Marsh in general mental vigor or special linguistic genius. His published works are eminently fresh and original, not of any school, not discussions of other students’ views but clear statements of what he saw with his own eyes in his own copies of the original works, with the comments of an American thinker. His “Lectures on the English Language,” delivered before the post-graduates of Columbia College in 1859, and “Lectures on the Origin and History of the English Language and Its Early Literature,” delivered before the Lowell Institute in 1860, were almost extemporaneous utterances from the stores of his earlier studies, but they were everywhere recognised as the best books of their kind, and they are still counted among the books which no gentleman’s library can be without.

  Those lectures for Harvard and Columbia resulting in his scholarly books upon early English literature and language; scholarly and interesting, but lacking the careful synthesis which is apt to be lacking in works written swiftly, out of whatever fulness of knowledge, for a special and pressing occasion. He himself was never quite satisfied with these “chips” hewed away from the tree of his knowledge. In “Man and Nature,” there was enough of wise observation, sound reasoning, cumulated knowledge for a half-dozen treatises; but there was also that unstudied assemblage of parts which did not invite the lazy companionship and easy perusal of the average book-reader.