colleges are
recognized agencies to help produce them.

Our literature is also largely the fruit of college labor and tastes.
The colleges, as centers of intellectual life, have fostered literary
tastes in those who have built up and enriched literature. Their
libraries and lectures have gathered together men of literary aims and
ambitions, so that the seat of the college has become the home of new
and grand ideas, which at once encourage literature and science. This
congenial intellectual atmosphere has incited many a young person to
project noble literary plans.

The majority of great writers have spent years at the university. Lord
Bacon outlined his gigantic plan for "the Instauration of the
Sciences" during the four years spent in the University of Cambridge.
Milton laid the foundations of his classical scholarship in the
university. "Newton was matured in academic discipline, a fellow in
Trinity College, Cambridge, and a professor of mathematics. He passed
fifteen years of his life in the cloisters of a college, and solved
the problems of the universe from the turret over Trinity gateway."

The literary influences of our colleges were early manifest in our
nation. The scholarship, classical taste, and fine literary style of
the superior men in public life led the Earl of Chatham, in the House
of Lords, in 1775, to pay "a tribute of eloquent homage to the
intellectual force, the symmetry, and the decorum of the state papers
recently transmitted from America, which was virtually an announcement
that America had become an integral part of the civilized world, and a
member of the republic of letters."

The colleges have nourished the conditions out of which a pure,
classical literature may grow. Such men as Edward T. Channing, of
Harvard, and Webster, Worcester and Goodrich, of Yale, have performed
an inestimable service in preparing the way for our mother tongue to
be spoken in its purity.

In the line of history, the American colleges have given the nation
such men as Bancroft, Parkman, Palfrey, Prescott, Motley, Winthrop and
Adams. In the sciences, there are Dana, Gray, Cooke, Walker, Porter,
Woolsey and Agassiz. In law and political science, we have Hamilton,
Jefferson, Adams, Evarts, Webster, Chase, Choate, Everett and Sumner.
These men have been the true architects of the state. The pulpit is
represented by such men as Mather, Edwards, Dwight, Storrs, Warren,
Beecher, Talmage, Cook, Thomson and Brooks.