Page:Memoir of George B. Wood, M. D., LL.D.djvu/37

 merely; it was both elegant and forcible; varied without eccentricity, and polished, although devoid of ornament. His anniversary discourses on public occasions connected with the Pennsylvania Hospital, and his introductory and other addresses at the University, were models of their kind; and there are passages in his History of Christianity in India, which, without any of the brilliant adornments of a Macaulay, would not seem, in their manner, out of place upon the pages of a Bancroft or a Prescott.

His youthful ventures into the realm of poetic authorship have been already mentioned. The exact date of the composition of his longest versified work is not known to me. The copy which I possess was printed in Philadelphia, in 1864, without its author's name. It was dedicated to his wife, in language of admiration and tenderness; as the one who, as he therein says, "hast taught me how much a woman can love, and hast enabled me, through the feelings thou hast inspired, to measure the depth of affection of which the manly heart is capable."

This poem was an epic, in rhymed heroic verse, entitled, "First and Last; a Poem intended to illustrate the ways of God to man," It is divided into eighteen chapters (instead of books or cantos), making a 12mo volume of more than two hundred and fifty pages.

In reading it, one might easily forget that its author was a man of practical mundane experience and cyclopædic research, an authority in precise and applied