Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/39

 Y X_ The German Influence 45 1 received new affluents; as it had been headed toward America by the poUtical disturbances of the American and the French Revolutions, so, apparently, it ceased with the Revolutionary period, though Du Ponceau and Pickering continued to produce works of genuine scholarship, and the initial impulse imparted by Jefferson's French ideas reached a ripe issue in the opening of the University of Virginia in 1825. German scholarship did not come to these shores until after Americans had gone abroad to get it. The German immigra- tion to New York and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century brought few scholars. It was not until 1824 that the pioneers of the riper German culture, Karl Beck (i 798-1 866) and Karl FoUen (1785-1840), arrived, at a time when Everett, Ticknor, Cogswell, and Bancroft had all returned from their studies in Germany. FoUen and Beck, like Pietro Bachi, who came a year later, emigrated in consequence of the disturbances that attended the end of the Napoleonic regime. FoUen had taken part in the war of liberation and had been one of the founders of the Burschenschaften. Charged with complicity in the assassination of Kotzebue, he made his escape to Switzerland, and then to Paris. There he feU in with his friend Karl Beck, likewise a refugee, and the two together came to America. Upon the recommendation of Ticknor, Beck was appointed teacher of Latin and gymnastics in the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1832 he became professor of Latin at Harvard, where he remained until his death in 1866. Upon Ticknor's recommendation, too, FoUen was appointed instructor in German at Harvard — ^the first to teach that sub- ject there. He soon became a citizen, was highly esteemed among the Boston liberals, was a friend of W. E. Channing and of James Freeman Clarke, and himself entered the Unita- rian ministry. In 1830 he was advanced to a fuU professorship of the German Language and Literature, which, however, was endowed for a period of five years only. He published a Ger- man reader (1826) and a German grammar (1828). His loss of his Harvard position is thought to have been due to his anti-slavery propaganda; and thenceforth he threw himself stiU more enthusiastically into speechmaking and preaching. With the return of Edward Everett (1794-1865), George Ticknor (1791-1871), Joseph Green CogsweU (1786-1871), and