An American poet and geologist; born in Kensington, Connecticut, Sept. 15, 1795. In 1815 he graduated at Yale, at the head of his class. After leaving college he taught school for a time, studied medicine and practiced in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1822, while in the last-named place, he published “Prometheus” and “Clio.” In 1824 Dr. Percival was appointed assistant army surgeon and professor of chemistry in the United States Military Academy, but resigned after a few months to become a surgeon in the recruiting service at Boston. At that time he contributed to the United States Literary Magazine and published a collection of his poems (2 vols. 1826). In 1827 he removed to New Haven, Connecticut, where he published the third part of his tragedy, “Clio.” In 1834 he made a particular study of geology, and in the year following was appointed to make a geological and mineralogical survey of Connecticut, in connection with Prof. Charles U. Shepard. In 1843 he published “Dream of a Day.” In 1853 he surveyed the lead region of the American Mining Company in Wisconsin, and in 1854 was appointed geologist of that state. A complete collection of his poems was published in two volumes (1859). He died in Hazel Green, Wisconsin, May 2, 1856.

Personal

  Yet it must be added that, on the whole, his life was a complete shipwreck. He lived to excite admiration and wonder; yet in poverty, in isolation, in a complete solitude of the heart. He had not, I think, a single vice; his life was pure, just, upright. How then did he fail? The truth seems to be, that he was deficient in that sympathy which binds man to man, and hence, he was an anomaly in the society among which he dwelt—a note out of tune with the great harmony of life around him. He was a grand intellect, a grand imagination, but without a heart. That he was born with a bosom full of all love and all kindness, we can not doubt; but the golden bowl seems to have been broken, almost at the fountain. By the time he was twenty he began to stand aloof from his fellow-man. I think he had been deeply injured—nay ruined—by the reading of Byron’s works, at that precise age when his soul was in all the sensitive bloom of spring, and its killing frost of atheism, of misanthropy, of pride, and scorn, fell upon it, and converted it into a scene of desolation. The want of a genial circle of appreciation, of love and friendship, around his early life, left this malign influence to deepen his natural shyness into a positive and habitual self-banishment from his fellow-man. Such the sad interpretation I put upon his career.

  Slender in form, rather above than under the middle height, he had a narrow chest, and a peculiar stoop, which was not in the back, but high up in the shoulders. His head, without being large, was fine. His eyes were of dark hazel, and possessed uncommon expression. His nose, mouth, and chin were symmetrically, if not elegantly formed, and came short of beauty only because of that meagreness which marked his whole person. His complexion, light without redness, inclined to sallow, and suggested a temperament somewhat bilious. His dark brown hair had become thin above the forehead, revealing to advantage the most striking feature of his countenance. Taken all together, his appearance was that of a weak man, of delicate constitution,—an appearance hardly justified by the fact; for he endured fatigue and privation with remarkable staunchness. Percival’s face, when he was silent, was full of calm, serious meditation; when speaking, it lighted up with thought, and became noticeably expressive. He commonly talked in a mild, unimpassioned undertone, but just above a whisper, letting his voice sink with rather a pleasing cadence at the completion of each sentence.

  I have not sought to conceal the peculiarities of Percival, or to tone down every expression which relates to others, though I have not intended to print what would cause pain in any one. To give a plain and true narrative of the poet as he lived and labored has been my only aim and purpose; and I cannot part with a work which has engaged me for nearly a decade of years and which, in the providence of God, I have been spared to complete, without saying that, with all my studies of Percival,—and I believe there is not much more to be known,—the simple reverence for his genius and attainments which I had in boyhood has increased with a riper knowledge of his character.

  It is a sad story. The rarest and most varied endowments, the most favorable opportunities, the most devoted friends did not rescue him from the most pitiable poverty, misanthropy and despair. He limited his own renown, disappointed his own expectations, and thwarted his own projects. The suicide which in early life he repeatedly attempted was the epitome of his whole career. He was his own worst enemy. It is hardly too much to say that his life was prolonged self-destruction—not in purpose but in fact. Yet, so far as it appears from the present biography, he had none of the baser vices of mankind. Neither alcohol nor opium beclouded his intellect, he was not lazy nor forgetful, nor dissipated nor unkind. He was keenly sensitive in respect to the good opinions of his fellows, though he detested empty flattery, and shrank like a hermit from that public attention which is the penalty and the plague of distinguished men. He performed the most wearisome literary drudgery for the most meagre rewards, and, though he must be said to have been negligent in the extreme respecting his engagements, he was punctilious in respect of scientific accuracy.

  In character, Percival seems to have been a Coleridge who had some pride of independence, a Coleridge with scruples…. What disgusted me first with him was the pretended attempt at suicide. If he had been in earnest, he would have never made himself visible in the orchard in time to be antidoted with coffee. It gives a flavor of insincerity to all the rest that follows.

  As a philologist Percival was the most remarkable man of his generation. Self-taught, he was conversant with the literature, in the original, of every country of Europe. Many of the dialects he mastered sufficiently to employ in writing poetry. When Ole Bull landed in this country, Percival greeted him with a poem written in Danish. Percival’s last printed poem was written in German. Prof. Shepard says that he is known to have written verse in thirteen different languages; he imitated all the Greek and German meters, amusing himself in 1823 with rendering select passages from Homer in English hexameters, with the encouraging approbation of Prof. Kingsley. In the 40’s he printed a series of excerpts from the three leading groups of European languages—the Slavonic, the German, the Romanic. Each of these three groups embraces four languages; the Slavonic—Polish, Russian, Servian, Bohemian; the Germanic—German, Low Dutch, Danish, Swedish; the Romanic—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French. Material assistance was given by Percival to Dr. Webster in the editorial work connected with the publication of the great dictionary that bears the name of the latter. Percival engaged to correct the proofsheets, but speedily his great scholarship in etymologies and scientific bearing of words caused his work to be greatly amplified. It amounted in fact to correcting and editing of the manuscript.

General

  We should sincerely regret that powers, so fine as Mr. Percival evidently possesses, should want that self-consciousness, which they ought to inspire, or should feel a doubt of that public favour, they so truly deserve: and though he probably does not rely on anything he has yet written, as giving him a fair title to the rank of a classical American poet, yet we feel no hesitation in saying, that he shares with few the gifts, which might make him one.

  There is an excessive diffuseness in the style of Mr. Percival. It is not sufficiently compact. It wants pith and point; it lacks the energy which conciseness imparts. Everything is drawn out as far as possible; always flowing and sweet, and therefore sometimes languid and monotonous. His poetry is too much diluted. It consists too much in words, which are music to the ear, but too often send a feeble echo of the sense to the mind. There is also a superabundance of images in proportion to the thoughts. They skip about the magical scene in such numbers, that they stand in the way of one another and of the main design. He is too careless in selection; whatever occurs to him he puts down and lets it remain.

  The poem before us is, in our opinion, not only one of the most successful efforts of its author, but a production of singular beauty and excellence in its kind. It is not properly a didactic poem, for it does not aim at the regular delivery of precepts, and still less does it depend for its interest upon anything like narrative. It is a series of poetical pictures, connected by a common subject, and drawn with that freedom of outline and richness of coloring peculiar to the author.

  The most prolific and fanciful of our poets…. He has all the natural qualities of a great poet, but he lacks the artistic skill, or declines the labour, without which few authors gain immortality. He has a brilliant imagination, remarkable command of language, and an exhaustless fountain of ideas. He writes with a facility but rarely equalled, and when his thoughts are once committed to the page, he shrinks from the labour of revising, correcting, and condensing…. He possesses in an eminent degree the creative faculty, and his genius is versatile. He has been an admirer and a student of nature, and he describes the visible world, in its minutest details, with feeling and accuracy. The moral tendency of his writings is generally correct; but in one or two poems there is a strain of misanthropy, and in some of his earliest ones there are imitations of skepticism.

  The poetical celebrity of our author is widely extended. The amount of his writings has scarcely been equalled by any American poet. He is certainly a man of genius, and unites to the vivid imagination of the bard, the observing eye of the minute naturalist. But his fancy is under very little regulation or restraint. His verse, though it flows in a melodious stream, seems without art; in his descriptions, objects of greater and less importance are thrown together without proportion, and, notwithstanding all his beauties, the reader is overwhelmed even to weariness with the multitude of his images. But whatever faults severe criticism may lay to his charge, the public voice has long since proclaimed Dr. Percival a true poet, and has assigned him a place with the few choice spirits who grace the upper walks of our literature.

  Perhaps a facile power of expression has tended to limit his poetic fame, by inducing a diffuse, careless, and unindividual method; although choice pieces enough can easily be gleaned from his voluminous writings to constitute a just and rare claim to renown and sympathy.

  However much distinguished Mr. Percival may be for his classical learning, and for his varied attainments in philology and general science, he will be chiefly known to posterity as one of our most eminent poets, for the richness of his fancy, the copiousness and beauty of his language, his life like descriptions, his sweet and touching pathos, as well as, at times, his spirited and soul-stirring measures.

  With a nature singularly unplastic, unsympathetic, and self-involved, he was incapable of receiving into his own mind the ordinary emotions of men and giving them back in music; and with a lofty conception of the object and purposes of poesy, he had neither the resolution nor the power which might have enabled him to realize it. He offers as striking an example as could be found of the poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious qualities which make the poetic faculty. His verse carries every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can crowd, but the craft is cranky, and we miss that deep-grasping keel of reason which alone can steady and give direction. His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer the helm, and in his longer poems, like “Prometheus,” half the voyage is spent in trying to make up for a leeway which becomes at last irretrievable. If he had a port in view when he set out, he seems soon to give up all hope of ever reaching it; and wherever we open the log-book, we find him running for nowhere in particular, as the wind happens to lead, or lying-to in the merest gale of verbiage…. Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he forthwith produced his bale of verses from a loom capable of turning off a hitherto unheard-of number of yards to the hour, and perfectly adapted to the amplitude of our territory, inasmuch as it was manufactured on the theory of covering the largest surface with the least possible amount of meaning that would hold words together…. He spent his life, like others of his class, in proclaiming himself a neglected Columbus, ever ready to start on his voyage when the public would supply the means of building his ships. Meanwhile, to be ready at a moment’s warning, he packs his mind pellmell like a carpet-bag, wraps a geologist’s hammer in a shirt with a Byron collar, does up Volney’s “Ruins” with an odd volume of Wordsworth, and another of Bell’s “Anatomy” in a loose sheet of Webster’s Dictionary, jams Moore’s poems between the leaves of Bopp’s Grammar,—and forgets only such small matters as combs and brushes.

  Percival’s poetry (though more highly esteemed forty years ago) fails to answer the reader’s expectations, or to hold the attention beyond half a dozen pages. He undoubtedly had a perception of the beauty of nature, and there are frequent glimpses of this beauty in his poems; but they are fragmentary, scattered hints, rather than completed pictures, and remind us of the “broken crockery” school in the sister art of music. His thoughts, or, rather, his phrases, deflected by the turning corners of rhyme, run away with him, taking a new direction in every verse, and leading into eddies of words that even his friend the lexicographer could not have helped him out of, and that makes the perplexed reader wonder where, when, and how the many-jointed sentence is going to end. Percival had his poetic visions, doubtless, but he forgot that the word poet means maker, and he neglected the continuous labor and thought that might have shaped his glowing conceptions into forms of enduring beauty. His name and his works belong to the literary history of the country, but only a few of his simpler poems will remain to justify in some measure his reputation among his contemporaries.

  Though recognized by friends as a poet of the first (American) class, he never succeeded in interesting the great body of his intelligent countrymen in any but a few of his minor poems. He ranks among the great sorrowing class of neglected geniuses. A man of large though somewhat undigested erudition, knowing many languages and many sciences, he was seemingly ignorant of the art of marrying his knowledge to his imagination. When he wrote in prose, he was full of matter; when he wrote in verse, he was full of glow and aspiration and fancy, but wanting in matter.

  His carelessness has consigned him, along with others far less gifted, to oblivion.

  James Gates Percival was one of those unhappy mortals that never can get the sentimental nonsense shaken out of them by even the roughest contact with the world. He was bound to take a despairing view of everything. No amount of worldly success could persuade him to be cheerful. He was determined to write, and when he found that people read and rather liked his poetry, he vowed that he would write no more. It is needless to add, these oft-repeated vows of silence were broken whenever circumstances seemed to justify. Then because he was not exalted to a pinnacle higher than that occupied by a Byron or a Moore, the reading public was denounced for its sordid taste…. In spite of his Byronic tendencies, there is a nervous power in his verse that places him far above the majority of his predecessors. His fancies pour forth in a tumultuous flood that bewilders more than it pleases the reader. But some of his lighter pieces, like “The Coral Grove” show the delicacy of his fancy when not clouded by his constitutional melancholy. His “May” and “Seneca Lake” fully deserve the wide circulation which they enjoy.