hin the years covered by this
chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other
American university town. The {474} neighborhood of Boston, where the
commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in
New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard
College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured
toleration, and made possible that free and even audacious interchange
of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From
these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard
scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry
erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there
were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as
teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits and men of the
world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated
from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley,
Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale, some of whom took up their
residence at Cambridge, others at Boston and others at Concord, which
was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In
1836, when Longfellow became Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard,
Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which
Thoreau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's
Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel
and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil
Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by {475}
the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous
chapter, was an undergraduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838
and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of Modern Languages.
Holmes had been chosen in 1847 Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in
the Medical School--a position which he held until 1882. The
historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817
respectively. The former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and
Isabella_, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college
in 1822-23 and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_
was issued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical
writers, Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844.
Cambridge was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of
Boston, such as Lowell desc