and her heart with the poets and the philosophers; one may
steadfastly pursue her way toward the command of a hospital, and the
other towards the world of letters and of art; these divergences
constitute no barrier, but rather an aid to the fulness of friendship.
And the fact that one goes in a simple gown which she has earned and
made herself, and the other lives when at home in a merchant's modern
palace--what has that to do with the things the girls care about and
the dreams they talk over in the walk by the river or the bicycle ride
through country roads? If any young man to-day goes through Harvard
lonely, neglected, unfriended, if any girl lives solitary and wretched
in her life at Wellesley, it is their own fault. It must be because
they are suspicious, unfriendly or disagreeable themselves. Certainly
it is true that in the associations of college life, more than in any
other that the country can show, what is extraneous, artificial, and
temporary falls away, and the every-day relations of life and work take
on a character that is simple, natural, genuine. And so it comes about
that the fourth gift of college life is ideals of personal character.

To some people the shaping ideals of what character should be, often
held unconsciously, come from the books they are given by the persons
whom they most admire before they are twenty years old. The greatest
thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a
student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. The college
professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them--ah,
they were few, and I am sure I did not have a dozen conversations with
them outside their class rooms--gave me, each in his different way, an
ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which
they and I were totally unconscious at the time. For many years I have
known that my study with them, no matter whether of philosophy or of
Greek, of mathematics or history or English, enlarged my notions of
life, uplifted my standards of culture, and so inspired me with new
possibilities of usefulness and of happiness. Not the facts and
theories that I learned so much as the men who taught me, gave this
inspiration. The community at large is right in saying that it wants
the personal influence of professors on students, but it is wholly
wrong in assuming that this precious influence comes from frequent
meetings or talks on miscellaneous subjects. Ther