A productive and versatile college administrator in his day, Cornelius Conway Felton is all but forgotten except, perhaps, in the footnotes and indices of books on the Transcendentalists, with whose views he had little sympathy but some of whom he influenced greatly, and nearly all of whom he knew personally. Classical scholar, translator, essayist, reviewer, bon viveur, clubman, professor, administrator, and nineteenth president of Harvard, Felton is remembered less for his own writings, which were copious and various, than for the influence he exerted on the course of classical studies in the United States, on educational reform, and on individual minds that he helped to mold during his thirty-five years of teaching at Harvard. His greatest legacy may indeed be his role in shaping the extraordinary and erratic genius of Henry David Thoreau. Felton earned the affection and respect of students as diverse as Jones Very and James...