better appointed students, who loitered idly along the court, at the rude
garb and saturnine appearance of the humble under-graduate; and the calm
countenance of the grave, but amiable man, who then bore the honour and
onus of mathematical lecturer at our college, would soften into a glance
of mingled approbation and pity, as he noted the eagerness which spoke
from the wan cheek and emaciated frame of the ablest of his pupils,
hurrying--after each legitimate interruption--to the enjoyment of the
crabbed characters and worm-worn volumes, which contained for him all the
seductions of pleasure, and all the temptations of youth.

It is a melancholy thing, which none but those educated at a college can
understand, to see the debilitated frames of the aspirants for academical
honours; to mark the prime--the verdure--the glory--the life--of life
wasted irrevocably away in a labor ineptiarum, which brings no harvest
either to others or themselves. For the poet, the philosopher, the man of
science, we can appreciate the recompence if we commiserate the
sacrifice; from the darkness of their retreat there goes a light--from
the silence of their studies there issues a voice, to illumine or
convince. We can imagine them looking from their privations to the far
visions of the future, and hugging to their hearts, in the strength of no
unnatural vanity, the reward which their labours are certain hereafter to
obtain. To those who can anticipate the vast dominions of immortality
among men, what boots the sterility of the cabined and petty present? But
the mere man of languages and learning--the machine of a memory heavily
but unprofitably employed--the Columbus wasting at the galley oar the
energies which should have discovered a world--for him there is no day-
dream of the future, no grasp at the immortality of fame. Beyond the
walls of his narrow room he knows no object; beyond the elucidation of a
dead tongue he indulges no ambition; his life is one long school-day of
lexicons and grammars--a fabric of ice, cautiously excluded from a single