because it was the standard of the school.

He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much
affected his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and
stood watching vaguely for a path and a direction. The world
outside seemed large, but the paths that led into it were not
many and lay mostly through Boston, where he did not want to go.
As it happened, by pure chance, the first door of escape that
seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James Russell Lowell
opened it.

Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of
Belles-Lettres, had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back
whatever he found to bring. The literary world then agreed that
truth survived in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold,
Renan, Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the
German faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of
coming capitalism -- its money-lenders, its bank directors, and
its railway magnates. Thackeray and Dickens followed Balzac in
scratching and biting the unfortunate middle class with savage
ill-temper, much as the middle class had scratched and bitten the
Church and Court for a hundred years before. The middle class had
the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the
satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed
that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a danger to
England, they turned to Germany because at that moment Germany
was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind
western Europe in the simplicity of its standard. German thought,
method, honesty, and even taste, became the standards of