hes 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
some striking exceptions. 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 within the years covered by this
chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other
American university town. The 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