After the death of his father, Zerah’s course of life was not less vacillating and unsuccessful, however, so it seems that his failures were not altogether due to his father’s bad counsels. He remained a while in London, making astronomical calculations and doing other mathematical work, as chance offered it. Aided by his old benefactor, Lord Bristol, he at last set out to seek his mother and family. She had done better alone. “During the long absence of her husband, with a family of eight children, and almost entirely destitute of property, she had sustained the burthen with indomitable energy. She wrought with her own hands in house and field; bargained away the little farm for a better one; and as her son says, ‘by a course of persevering industry, hard fare and trials such as few women are accustomed to, she has hitherto succeeded in supporting herself, beside doing a good deal for her children.’” Lucky for the family that one of them was not a genius. Mathematics, however, seems to be a form of monomania from which her sex is generally exempt. In fact, in the long list of eccentric Americans from which I can choose subjects for this series of sketches, I fear there is not to be one eccentric woman. This can be taken as complimentary to the sex or not, according as the reader regards eccentricity.
Our arithmetical prodigy, now twenty years old, went to teaching a country school for a living, and at last fetched up in that other safe retreat of preaching the gospel. He followed this vocation with more persistence and credit than he had brought to any other of his numerous professions, though on his own modest representation he was not much of a preacher. His last venture was to become professor of—not mathematics—but languages in the “Vermont University” at Norwich. In this situation his life terminated, March 2, 1840. He plaintively, but in a somewhat pedantic style, sums up his career as follows:
“Perhaps it has fallen to the lot of very few, if any individuals, while attracting curiosity and notice, to receive at the same time so many flattering marks of kindness, and it is not unfrequently a sorrowful reflection to him that after all the sympathy and benevolence shown by the liberal and scientific, certain unforeseen and unfortunate causes have prevented and still prevent his reaching and sustaining that distinguished place in the mathematical literature of the age to which, on account of the singular gift bestowed on him, he seemed to be destined. Now, after possessing that talent twenty-two years, he feels unable to account for its donation, and is unaware of its object.”