Percival,

Percival, JAMES GATES, an American poet, was born at Kensington, Connecticut, 15th September 1795, graduated at Yale in 1815, at the head of his class, and afterwards studied botany and medicine. But his heart was not in herbs and physic, and although he practised—or rather advertised his willingness to practise—both in Kensington and in Charleston, S.C., very few professional calls dragged him from his favourite studies. His poems Prometheus and Clio appeared at Charleston in 1822. Two years later he filled for a few months the chair of Chemistry at West Point; but he found the duties heavy and irksome, and took himself to Boston, and then to New Haven. There the third part of Clio was published (1827). Percival afterwards divided his attention between his verses and geology, and as he grew older he gave more and more of his time to the new love, the visible results being Reports on the Geology of Connecticut (1842) and of Wisconsin (1855). These are valuable but very dry, and in delicious contrast to his poems, which flow freely and with volume, and on whose fluent, half-careless lines their author's learning is borne as easily as trees on a river in flood. His Dream of a Day appeared in 1843, and occasional lyrics for a long time after. He was appointed geologist of Wisconsin in 1854, and died there at Hazel Green, on 2d May 1856. His collected works were published in 1859, his Life and Letters, by J. H. Ward, in 1866.