The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862. Various

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      Two nephews of the President,

      And the Professor's son,

      (They turned a little Indian by,

      As brown as any bun;)

      Lord! how the Seniors knocked about

      That Freshman class of one!'

      From small beginnings and short lives our colleges have gathered neither that momentum of years heavy with mighty names and weighty memories, nor of wealth heaping massive piles and drawing within their cloistered walls the learning of successive centuries which carries the European universities crashing down the ages, though often heavy laden with the dead forms of mediæval preciseness. No established church makes with them common cause, no favoring and influential aristocracy gives them the careless security of a complete protection. Their development thus far has been under very different influences. Founded in the wilderness by our English ancestors, they were, at first, it is true, in their course of study and in foolish formula of ceremony an imperfect copy of trans-Atlantic originals. Starting from this point, their course has been shaped according to the peculiar genius of our institutions and people. Republican feeling has dispensed with the monastic dress, the servile demeanor toward superiors, and the ceremonious forms which had lost their significance. The peculiar wants of a new country have required not high scholarship, but more practical learning to meet pressing physical wants. Again, our numerous religious sects requiring each a nursery of its own children, and the great extent of our country, have called, or seemed to call (in spite of continually increasing facility of intercourse) for some one hundred and twenty colleges within our borders. Add to this a demand not peculiar but general—the increased claim of the sciences and of modern languages upon our regard—and the accompanying fallacy of supposing Latin and Greek heathenish and useless, and we have a summary view of the influences bearing upon our literary institutions. Hence both good and evil have arisen. Our colleges easily conforming in their youthful and supple energy, have met the demands of the age. They have thrown aside their monastic gowns and quadrangular caps. They have in good degree given up the pedantic follies of Latin versification and Hebrew orations. Their walls have arisen alike in populous city and lonely hamlet, and in poverty and insignificance they have been content could they give depth and breadth to any small portion of the national mind. They have conceded to Science the place which her rapid and brilliant progress demanded. On the other hand, however, we see long and well-proven systems of education profaned by the ignorant hands of superficial reformers. We see the colleges themselves dragging on a precarious life, yet less revered than cherished by fostering sects, and more hooted at by the advocates of potato-digging and other practical pursuits, than defended by their legitimate protectors. It is not to be denied that there is a powerful element of Materialism among us, and that too often we neither appreciate nor respect the earnest, abstruse scholar. The progress of humanity must be shouted in popular catch-words from the house-tops, and the noisy herald appropriates the laudation of him who in pain and weariness traced the hidden truth. We hear men of enlarged thought and lofty views derided as old fogies because beyond unassisted appreciation, until we are half-tempted to believe the generation to be multiplied Ephraims given to their idols, who had best be let alone.

      The American student, under these influences, differs somewhat from his European brethren. He is younger by two or three years. Though generally from the better class, he is more, perhaps, identified with the mass of the people, and is more of a politician than a scholar. His remarks upon the Homeric dialects, however laudatory, are most suspiciously vague, and though he escape such slight errors as describing the Gracchi as a barbarous tribe in the north of Italy or the Piræus as a meat-market of Athens, you must beware of his classical allusions. On the other hand he is more moral, a more independent thinker and a freer man than his prototype across the sea. His fault is, as Bristed says, that he is superficial; his virtue, that he is straightforward and earnest in aiming at practical life.

      Such may suffice for a few general remarks. But some memories of one of our most important universities will better set forth the habits and customs of the joyous student-life than farther wearisome generality.

      The pleasant days are gone that I dreamed away beneath the green arcades of the fair Elm City. But still come the budding spring and the blooming summer to embower those quiet streets and to fill the morning hour with birds' sweet singing. Still comes the gorgeous autumn—the dead summer lain in state—and the cloud-robed winter to round the circling year. Still streams the golden sunlight through the green canopies of tented elms, and still, I ween, do pretty school-girls (feminine of student) loiter away in flirting fascination the holiday afternoons beneath their shade. Still do our memories haunt those old walks we loved so well: the avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, where the midnight moon shone so softly through the dark masses of foliage and slept so sweetly on the sloping green. Still do those old wharves and warehouses—ancient haunts of colonial commerce and scenes of continental struggle—rest there in dusty quiet, hearing but murmurs of the noisy merchant-world without; and the fair bay lies silent among those green hills that slope southward to the Sound. Methinks I hear the ripple of its moonlit waves as in the summer night it upbore our gallant boat and its fair freight; the far-off music stealing o'er the bright waters; the distant rattling of some paid-out cable as a newly arrived bark anchors down the bay; or the lonely baying of a watch-dog at some farm-house on the hight. I see the sail-boats bending under their canvas and dashing the salt spray from their bows as they rush through the smooth water, and the oyster-boats cleaving the clear brine like an arrow, bound for Fair Haven, of many shell-fish; while sturdy sloops and schooners—suggestive of lobsters or pineapples—bow their big heads meekly and sway themselves at rest. I see again those long lines of green-wooded slope, here crowned by a lonely farm-house musing solitary on the hills as it looks off on the blue Sound, there ending abruptly in a weather-worn cliff of splintered trap, or anon bringing down some arable acres to the very beach, where a gray old cottage, kept in countenance by two or three rugged poplars, like the fisher's hut,

      Nor can I soon forget those wild hillsides, so glorious both when the summer floods of foliage came pouring down their sides, and when autumn, favorite child of the year, donned his coat of many colors and came forth to join his brethren. Then, on holiday-afternoon, free from student-care, we climbed the East or West Rock, and looked abroad over the distant city-spires, rock-ribbed hillside and sail-dotted sea; or threading the devious path to the Judges' Cave, where tradition said that in colonial times the regicides, Goffe and Whalley, lay hidden, read on the lone rock that in the winter wilderness overhung their bleak hiding-place, in an old inscription carved not without pain, in quaint letters of other years, the stern and stirring old watchword:

      Or, going further, we climbed Mount Carmel, and looked from its steep cliff down into the solitary rock-strewn valley—

      Or went on to the Cheshire hillside, where the Roaring Brook, tumbling down the steep ravine, flashed its clear waters into whitest foam, and veiled the unsightly rocks with its snowy spray; or, perchance, in cumbrous boat, floated upon Lake Saltonstall, hermit of ponds, set like a liquid crystal in the emerald hills—an eyesore to luckless piscatory students, but highly favored of all lovers of ice, whether applied to the bottoms of ringing High Dutchers, or internally in shape of summer refrigerators.

      In the midst of these pleasant haunts and this fair city, lies a sloping green of twenty or twenty-five acres, girt and bisected by rows of huge elms, and planted with three churches, whose spires glisten above the tall trees, and with a stuccoed State СКАЧАТЬ