SILL, EDWARD ROWLAND (1841-1887), American author and educator, was born at Windsor, Conn., April 29, 1841. Theodore Sill, his father, was a well-known physician of the dis trict. His mother died in 1852 and his father shortly thereafter. Young Sill then went to live with relatives at Cuyahoga Falls, 0. and at Honesdale, Pa. He studied for a year at Phillips Exeter academy, then entered Yale university in 1857. He drifted through college, where his poetic talents were given due recognition ; but he was out of sympathy with the academic formalism of Yale and the Puritanic atmosphere of his surroundings. After his gradua tion in 1861 he had difficulty in finding a proper niche. He sailed for California, where for five years he worked in a post office, on a ranch, and as a clerk in a bank. He also made at tempts to study medicine and law. Upon his return to the East he entered Harvard Divinity school, but again he found himself restless in the confines of dogma, so he tried newspaper work in New York city, where he "didn't suit, wasn't suited, and quit." Then he turned definitely to teaching, and after a brief period in a rural school was, from 1869 to 1871, principal of the high school and superintendent of the grades in Cuyahoga Falls. Here he married his cousin, Elizabeth Sill. In 1871 he moved to Oak land, Calif., where for three years he taught English at the high school and served as principal. In 1874 he accepted a chair of English at the University of California. He became widely known
as an inspirational teacher.
He resigned from the faculty of the University of California in 1882. Before returning to the East he helped establish a new California magazine, The Overland Monthly. Once more at Cuy ahoga Falls, he devoted most of his time to writing and contrib uted frequently to The Atlantic Monthly and other periodicals. He died unexpectedly in Cleveland after a minor operation, on Feb. 27, 1887.
Sill had begun writing early in his youth; his first published volume was The Hermitage and Other Poems (1868), which ap peared shortly before he entered his lifetime career of teaching. About the same time he translated from the German a biography of Mozart, and in 1883, after his retirement from the University of California, he published The Venus of Milo and Other Poems. His essays were collected in 1900 as The Prose of Edward Row land Sill, and a complete collection of his poems was published in 1906.
Restraint and uncertainty and inner conflict in his search for spiritual truths during his youth are reflected in Sill's poetry. A humorous vein and a flair for apt imagery add much to the readability of both his poetry and prose. His best poems give him a place among the minor poets of America.