AMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.

1837-1861.

With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it
is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly
been, in themselves, literary centers. Most of them have been small
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 large 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 {473} 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 a
striking exception. 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
added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very
homogeneous _clientele_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of
Eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many
respects, was lived at old Cambridge wit