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本篇文章截止时间为：2017年10月29日前译回

In Medicine for March there is an interesting account of an American medical poet whose name, we imagine, will be as new to most of our readers as we confess it was to us. James Gates Percival was born in 1795, and after taking an arts degree at Yale was for some time engaged in teaching. He then studied medicine, and after graduating at Philadelphia entered the United States army as assistant-surgeon. He was for some time Professor of Chemistry at the famous military academy at West Point. Apparently he left the service to devote himself to scientific research, for he made a geological survey of Connecticut in the course of which he walked over every hill, plain, and morass in the State. In this work he was engaged for five years at an annual salary never exceeding £60. In addition to his scientific knowledge, he was a linguist, reading with ease Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and the Slavonic languages. But he was utterly wanting in the power of self-assertion; hence his great gifts were hidden from the world. His first efforts in verse were damned by the American press as brutally as were those of Keats by the Quarterly Review. If he was not, like the author of Endymion, killed off by one critique, the reviewers wounded his sensitive spirit so deeply that he tried to kill himself. Yet the workmanship of his verse was so fine that it earned praise from so severe a judge as Edgar Allan Poe…. At last, in the decline of his life, fortune seemed disposed to smile on the doctor-poet. In 1854, through the influence of some friends who knew his worth, Percival was appointed Geologist to the State of Wisconsin. His first report was published in 1855, and he was engaged on the second at the time of his death. If it be asked what caused the failure of a man so brilliantly endowed, so versatile in accomplishment, and so strenuous in work, we think the answer may be given in two words—diffidence and instability.