Germany was never so
powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing else
as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars with a
heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he sometimes doubted whether
they should be grateful. On the whole, he was content neither
with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught it. The
seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.
The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false
modesty he thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great
many experiments, and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed
to the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that he
tried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous to
the teachers than to the students; fallacious from the beginning
to end. He quitted the university at last, in 1877, with a
feeling. that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and
kindness shown by every one in it, from the President to the
injured students, he should be sore at his failure.
These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so
much disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college
insisted on expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far
in his notice of the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say
that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which
was a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily
returned; and set the kind expression down to camaraderie.
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