Alma Mater! Alma Mater! New-fashioned folks, with their large theories
of education, may find fault with thee. But a true Spartan mother thou
art: hard and stern as the old matron who bricked up her son Pausanius,
bringing the first stone to immure him,--hard and stern, I say, to the
worthless, but full of majestic tenderness to the worthy.

For a young man to go up to Cambridge (I say nothing of Oxford, knowing
nothing thereof) merely as routine work, to lounge through three years
to a degree among the (Greek word),--for such an one Oxford Street
herself, whom the immortal Opium-Eater hath so direly apostrophized, is
not a more careless and stony-hearted mother. But for him who will
read, who will work, who will seize the rare advantages proffered, who
will select his friends judiciously,--yea, out of that vast ferment of
young idea in its lusty vigor choose the good and reject the bad,--there
is plenty to make those three years rich with fruit imperishable, three
years nobly spent, even though one must pass over the Ass's Bridge to
get into the Temple of Honor.

Important changes in the Academical system have been recently announced,
and honors are henceforth to be accorded to the successful disciples in
moral and natural sciences. By the side of the old throne of Mathesis
they have placed two very useful fauteuils a la Voltaire. I have no
objection; but in those three years of life it is not so much the thing
learned as the steady perseverance in learning something that is
excellent.

It was fortunate, in one respect, for me that I had seen a little of the
real world,--the metropolitan,--before I came to that mimic one,--the
cloistral. For what were called pleasures in the last, and which might