Hampden Sydney College - Kaleidoscope Yearbook (Hampden Sydney, VA)

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WALTER BLAIR, A. M., D. L

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TN AD X31 ' PS iff xx: .. . Q. 'f' 25 ' 'J' lf w g af Illalter IIBIair, El. flb., . . HAVE been asked as a elassnmte and intimate friend ot' I rotessor Blair to write a short sketch of his life for TIIE IiALEIDOSCOPE. I ina-V be supposed, as a warni friend, to idealize his virtues and overlook or smooth away defects, but I shall hope to he just, so as 'tnothing to extenuate nor set down aught in malice. Dr. Blair is a native of Ric-lnnond, Virginia, coming of honorable stoekg being the son of YValt.er D. Blair and his wife, Miss Louisa IVills, ot' Kentucky. On the thther's side he is related to tl1e Jordans and W'instonsg on his motherls to the Carringtons, Mayos, and Cabells. He is a grandson of the well-known 'L Parson D. Blair of Virginia. In his iifteenth year young Blair left Richmond to attend school under Dabney, then pastor of Tinliling Spring Church, in Augusta county, Virginia. sixteen he entered the Junior Class at Hampden-Sidney College, where he was Dr. Robert I.. At the age ot graduated two years later, taking the second honor in his class. For a while he was tutor in the college, and made assistant professor in 1858, then full professor, with leave of absence to prosecute his studies in Europe. He remained in Germany for some time. He Caine home during our civil 19 ' 0

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war and joined the Richmond I-Iowitzers, was afterward made Sergeant-Major in Colonel Cabell's Battalion, holding this position to the end of the war: was present in thc battles ot the Army of Northern Virginia, passing through the dangers without receiving a wound. At the close of the war he entered upon his duties as professor of Latin, holding the chair until 1896, when wishing rest from his labors, on account of some weakness of sight, he resigned his professorship, and, with his family, visited Europe, where he has been spending the winter in Rome and Xaples. A As a professor of the Latin language Dr. Blair found the ideal life for him, suited to his habits and his tastes, his love of study and inclination to quiet, somewhat secluded, labors. He has been a close, persistent, and ardent student of the Latin, devoting himself to his classes and his daily duties with conscientious and faithful assiduity-grounding himself thoroughly in the principles and details of the language, seeking to understand its mechanism and the inner life which moulds its structure. Few men know what scholarship is, and how rare is real, accurate, and profound knowledge of any ancient, or as we say, dead language. Ripe .5-t-lmlms are not common products, nor do they come by nature, Scholarship is the result of hard and prolonged study. But I imagine I am not going beyond bounds when I say Professor Blair well deserves the praise of accurate and thorough scholarship in his special line of study, and has conscientiously sought to impart his knowledge to his classes. Though not particularly fond of metaphysical or psychological studies, he has been an interested student of psychology as the human mind has exhibited itself in the mechanism of language, tiuding a special delight in seeing how thought has incarnated itself in words and sentences, the genius and idioms of a language, following, so to speak, the stream of thought as it cuts out for itself a channel through all tl1e intricacies and verbal niceties of expression, and he has remarked to me that the pleasure I found in the literature of the Latin as a literature, 21