Thomas Day Seymour's Homeric Vocabulary is still a book on every Greek student's bookshelf, one of his many contributions to the study of Homeric language. In this essay, he gives a tribute to the life of William Dwight Whitney, an editor on Webster's Dictionary and a founding member of the American Philological Association. Principally a scholar of Sanskrit, he was a known expert on comparative linguistics. This piece was written shortly after this distinguished scholar's death and gives a touching portrait of a scholar's life. Of interest to those with an interest in Victorian biography and academia in America during the period following the Civil War, this piece also offers Classicists a valuable piece of their discipline's history.