Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Hedge, Levi

HEDGE, Levi, educator, b. in Hardwick, Mass., 19 April, 1766; d. in Cambridge, Mass., 3 Jan., 1844. He was graduated at Harvard in 1792, appointed a tutor in 1795, and in 1810 became professor of logic and metaphysics. In 1827 he exchanged that post for the Alford professorship of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil polity, but was compelled by an attack of paralysis to resign in 1830. He published a “System of Logic” (Boston, 1818), which went through many editions, and was translated into German. He also prepared an abridgment of Brown's “Mental Philosophy” (1827). — His son, Frederic Henry, educator, b. in Cambridge, Mass., 12 Dec., 1805; d. there, 21 Aug., 1890, was sent to school in Germany at the age of twelve, and remained five years. On his return he entered the junior class at Harvard, and was graduated in 1825. He then studied theology at the Cambridge divinity-school, was ordained in 1829, and settled over the Unitarian church in West Cambridge. In 1835 he took charge of a church in Bangor, Me.; in 1850, after spending a year in Europe, became pastor of the Westminster church in Providence, R. I., and in 1856 of the church in Brookline, Mass. In 1857 he was made professor of ecclesiastical history in the divinity-school at Harvard, still retaining his pastoral charge, but resigned the pastorship in 1872 in order to assume the professorship of the German language in the college. He was noted as a public lecturer as well as a pulpit orator. In 1853-'4 he lectured on mediæval history before the Lowell institute. He became editor of the “Christian Examiner” in 1858. Besides essays on the different schools of philosophy, notably magazine articles on St. Augustine, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, and Coleridge, and other contributions to periodicals in prose and poetry, he published “The Prose Writers of Germany,” containing extracts and biographical sketches (Philadelphia, 1848); “A Christian Liturgy for the Use of the Church” (Boston, 1856); “Reason in Religion” (Boston, 1865); and “The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition” (1870). He also wrote hymns for the Unitarian church, and assisted in the compilation of a hymn-book (1853), and published numerous translations from the German poets.