will gradually gain that experience, without which a man cannot arm
himself to meet the difficulties that beset all of us, more or less,
in the battle of life. He is just of an age, when some change from
the narrowed circle of home is necessary. God forbid that I should
ever speak in any but the highest terms of the moral good it must do
every young man to live under his mother's watchful eye, and be ever
in the company of pure-minded sisters. Indeed I feel this more
perhaps than many other parents would, because my lad, from his
earliest years, has been deprived of such tender training, and cut
off from such sweet society. But yet, with all this high regard for
such home influences, I put it to you, if there will not grow up in
the boy's mind, when he begins to draw near to man's estate, a very
weariness of all this, from its very sameness; a surfeiting, as it
were, of all these delicacies, and a longing for something to break
the monotony of what will gradually become to him a humdrum
horse-in-the-mill kind of country life? And it is just at this
critical time that college life steps in to his aid. With his new
life a new light bursts upon his mind; he finds that he is not the
little household-god he had fancied himself to be; his word is no
longer the law of the Medes and Persians, as it was at home; he meets
with none of those little flatteries from partial relatives, or
fawning servants, that were growing into a part of his existence; but
he has to bear contradiction and reproof, to find himself only an
equal with others, when he can gain that equality by his own deserts;
and, in short, he daily progresses in that knowledge of himself,
which, from the ~gnothiseauton~ days down to our own, has been found
to be about the most useful of all knowledge; for it gives a man
stability of character, and braces up his mental energies to a
healthy enjoyment of the business of life. And so, Green, I would
advise you, above all things, to let Verdant go to college."