Quotes:Corson, Hiram
Boris de Zirkoff
Corson, Hiram. American educator and author, b. in Philadelphia, Pa., Nov. 6, 1828; d. at Ithaca, N. Y., June 15, 1911. Received his earliest schooling in the home of his parents, Joseph Dickinson and Ann Hagey Corson. His father, a mathematician of exceptional ability, trained him in mathematical thought; and it was not until Hiram was fifteen that he was sent to the Treemount Seminary ·at Norristown, Pa., where, at the classical and mathematical school of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Aaron, and later at the classical school of the Rev. Dr. Anspach, at Barren Hill, Pa., he spent five years in study, distinguishing himself both in mathematics and the knowledge of Latin and Greek.
In the Fall of 1849, Hiram went to Washington, D.C., where he utilized his knowledge of stenography by connecting himself with the reporting corps of the United States Senate, for a time serving also as private secretary to Senator Lewis Cass. In the Summer of 1850 he became connected with the library of the Smithsonian Institution, then under the vigorous direction of the distinguished bibliographer, Prof. Charles Coffin Jewett. Under the direction of the latter, Hiram received a thorough training in bibliography and library management; he also attended for some seven years the literary and scientific courses given there by outstanding men of science. Stimulated by these, he gave all his leisure to the study of great literature-English, French and German. His marriage, in Sept., 1854, to Caroline Rollin, a lady of French birth and European education, deeply interested in literature, strongly stimulated his literary trends.
In 1859, moving with his family to his native city, he became a public lecturer on English literature, drawing to his audiences many cultivated people. He became widely known and liked. In 1864 Princeton conferred on him the degree of Master of Arts; and in the following year Girard College in Philadelphia elected him to its chair of moral science, history and rhetoric. Soon after he accepted the more congenial professorship of rhetoric and English literature in St. John’s College at Annapolis, Md. In 1870, he became associated with Cornell University, where he taught until 1903, when he was made professor emeritus, after a long and most fruitful career.
“It is with his work as a teacher of English literature that Prof. Corson is most familiarly associated, and by it he will perhaps be longest remembered. Possessed not only of a great breadth of culture and a rare discrimination, but of a voice of exceptional range and singular sympathetic power, he has been an interpreter and inspirer of no usual order ... For more than a generation of human life he stood foremost among his colleagues as a spokesman of the higher interests of the soul; and in every class which went out from Cornell he kindled something of his own noble love of literature, of his sensitiveness to the ideal, of his contempt for the merely material in act and life . . . However appreciative of the old, no one was ever more impatient of mere convention ... No venerable imposture escaped his scorn; no seer-eyed heresy failed of his welcome.” (W. T. Hewett, Cornell University, A History, 1905, Vol. II, pp. 39-40.)
In the many books which Prof. Hiram Corson wrote or edited, he dealt with most of the great phases of English letters. Among his works, the following should be mentioned as being, each one of them, examples of deep learning and noble aim: Handbook of Anglo-Saxon and Early English (1871); The University of the Future (1875); An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning’s Poetry (1886); An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare (1889); A Primer of English Verse, etc. (1892); The Aims of Literary Study (1895).
Prof. Corson did not limit his attention purely to letters; he was a zealous opponent of slavery, publicly deprecated many aspects of organized religion, and was deeply apprehensive of the social effects of concentrated wealth.
On July 15, 1874, Corson’s only daughter died and the blow was devastating. Hiram Corson found no comfort in the religion of the Churches and gradually turned to Spiritualism for some sign and assurance of the continued existence of his child. He later became convinced of that and his belief in Spiritualism became firmly established. He read Col. Olcott's articles in the New York Daily Graphic about the manifestations at the Eddys’ homestead at Chittenden, Vt., and also H.P.B.'s articles attacking Dr. Beard. He wrote to H.P.B. to learn the real facts and to know more about her. From this casual contact their mutual friendship grew, and after some spirited correspondence, the Corsons invited H.P.B. to visit their home in Ithaca, N. Y. The invitation was accepted and H.P.B. spent a few weeks with them in the Fall of 1875. The Corsons lived at that time in the Richardson Cottage, on Heustis Street, prior to the time when they occupied Cascadilla Cottage, where Hiram Corson died and where many of his books are dated.
It is at Ithaca that H.P.B. started to write Isis Unveiled in earnest, although the very beginning of it may have been already laid before she left New York. She wrote about twenty-five closely written foolscap pages a day, with no access to any books except those in the extensive library of the Corsons, which had no relation to her subject anyway. After H.P.B. returned to New York, a few additional letters were exchanged with the Corsons, but apparently, for one reason or another, their mutual friendship cooled. Some light is thrown on this subject by Eugene Rollin Corson, their son.
Caroline Rollin Corson, Prof. Corson’s wife, was pre-eminently social by nature; she adopted with full heart her husband’s country, and brought to him not only a rare intellectual sympathy, but to the little world of his colleagues and students a breadth of travelled experience, a refinement and grace of manner, a knowledge of books and men, and a facile charm of conversation which made their home a center of culture. She also became interested in Spiritualism, but only moderately; it never possessed her as it did Hiram Corson. She had accepted the loss of her daughter with composure and resignation, and her interest in H.P.B. was more in the woman herself than in her doctrines and mission. She was not interested in Occultism; on the contrary, she was greatly opposed to it. Eventually, she entered the Catholic Church, where she apparently found comfort, and she died May 21, 1901, at a convent in Rochester where she was in the habit of going at odd times for rest and retreat.
It would appear that Prof. Corson, being then a thorough believer in Spiritualism, could not accept either H.P.B.’s strictures on this Movement or her explanations concerning the phenomena of the seance-room; nor was he any better pleased with certain utterances of Col. Olcott in his lectures. Corson sided with the Spiritualists and published in the Banner of Light of Boston, Mass., some accusations against H.P.B.’s good faith. According to his son, Prof. Corson “was quite too hasty in his revulsion of feeling; he later realized it and was quite willing to admit it. His sorrow and his state of mind at the time may well explain the error he had fallen into... My father followed the future history of the Theosophical Society with great interest; he bought H.P.B.’s books as well as a number of works which were the direct outcome of the Society in India.”
The last preserved letter between H.P.B. and the Corsons was written to Mrs. Corson and dated from New York, August 28, 1878. There is no further evidence of any direct contact between them.
Prof. Corson's Spiritualistic views have been expressed by him in a book entitled Spirit Messages which was published posthumously in 1911.
Sources: H. Corson, Corson Family (1906); N.Y. Times, June 16, 17, 1911; Murray E. Poole, A Story Historical of Cornell University, etc. (1916); W. T. Hewett, Cornell University, etc. (1905); Eugene Rollin Corson, Some Unpublished Letters of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. lntrod. and Commentary (1929).
Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 1, pp. 450-453