and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities. Their
alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even
those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters
find little to attract them at the home of their _alma mater_, and seek
by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing
houses offer some hope of support in a literary career. Even in the
older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps
of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather
inclined to undervalue merely "literary" performance. In many cases
the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar,
the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of
learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses
free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the
originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it happens
that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact
sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy,
and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important,
they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of
the country. The professors of literature in our colleges are usually
persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of
rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to
write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing
that any one has ever read.

To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers
some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fashionable
university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective
courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of
undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics,
with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages