Next day, at St. Andrew's Church, he, as usual, had charge of the organ. Into his opening voluntary he wove the music of the preceding evening, the ``Feste Burg''; it ran through all the chants of the morning service; it pervaded the accompaniment to the hymns; it formed the undertone of all the interludes; it was not relinquished until the close of the postlude. And the same was true of the afternoon service. I have always insisted that, had he lived in Germany, he would have been a second Beethoven.
This will seem a grossly exaggerated tribute, but I do not hesitate to maintain it. So passionately was he devoted to music that at times he sent his piano away from his house in order to shun temptation to abridge his professorial work, and especially was this the case when he was preparing his edition of Vergil. A more lovely spirit never abode in mortal frame. No man was ever more generally beloved in a community; none, more lamented at his death. The splendid organ erected as a memorial to him in the great auditorium of the university; the noble monument which his students have placed over his grave;his portrait, which hangs in one of the principal rooms;the society which commemorates his name--all combine to show how deeply he was respected and beloved.
Entwined also with my happiest recollections is Brunnow, professor of astronomy and director of the observatory.
His eminence in his department was widely recognized, as was shown when he was afterward made director of the Dudley Observatory at Albany, N. Y., and, finally, astronomer royal of Ireland. His musical abilities, in connection with those of Frieze, aided to give a delightful side to this period of my life. There was in him a quiet simplicity which led those who knew him best to love him most, but it occasionally provoked much fun among the students. On one occasion, President Tappan, being suddenly called out of town, requested Brunnow, who had married his daughter and was an inmate of his family, to find some member of the faculty to take his place at morning prayers next day. Thereupon Brunnow visited sev-eral professors, his first question to each of them being, with his German use of the consonants, ``Professor, can you BRAY?'' and henceforward this was added to the many standing jokes upon him in the student world.
I also found at the university other admirable men, and among those to whom I became specially attached was Thomas M. Cooley. When he had become chief justice of the State, and the most eminent writer of his time on the Constitution of the United States, he was still the same man, gentle, simple, and kindly. Besides these were such well-known professors as Fasquelle in modern literature; Williams, Douglass, and Winchell in science;Boise in Greek; Palmer, Sager, and Gunn in medicine and surgery; Campbell and Walker in law. Of these Judge Campbell was to me one of the main attractions of the place--a profound lawyer, yet with a kindly humor which lighted up all about him. He was especially interested in the early French history of the State, to which he had been drawn by his study of the titles to landed property in Detroit and its neighborhood, and some of his discoveries were curious. One of these had reference to an island in the straits near Detroit known as ``Skillagalee,''
which had puzzled him a long time. The name seemed to be Irish, and the question was how an Irish name could have been thus applied. Finally he found on an old map an earlier name. It was le aus Galets, or Pebble Island, which, in the mouths of Yankee sailors, had taken this apparently Celtic form. Another case was that of a river in Canada emptying into the straits not far from Detroit. It was known as ``Yellow Dog River''; but, on rummaging through the older maps, he discovered that the earlier name was River St. John. To account for the transformation was at first difficult, but the mystery was finally unraveled: the Rivire St. Jean became, in the Canadian patois, Rivire Saan Jawne, and gradually Rivire Chien Jaune; recent geographers had simply translated it into English.
The features which mainly distinguished the University of Michigan from the leading institutions of the East were that it was utterly unsectarian, that various courses of instruction were established, and that options were allowed between them. On these accounts that university holds a most important place in the history of American higher education; for it stands practically at the beginning of the transition from the old sectarian college to the modern university, and from the simple, single, cast-iron course to the form which we now know, in which various courses are presented, with free choice between them. The number of students was about five hundred, and the faculty corresponded to these in numbers. Now that the university includes over four thousand students, with a faculty in proportion, those seem the days of small things; but to me at that period it was all very grand. It seemed marvelous that there were then very nearly as many students at the University of Michigan as at Yale;and, as a rule, they were students worth teaching--hardy, vigorous, shrewd, broad, with faith in the greatness of the country and enthusiasm regarding the nation's future.
