hat once helped to make these
friendships sweet. If Homer and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and
Browning are to have meaning for us when we need them most, it will be
because they come to us as old familiar friends whose influences have
permeated the glad and busy days before. The last time I heard James
Russell Lowell talk to college girls, he said,--for he was too ill to
say many words--"I have only this one message to leave with you. In
all your work in college never lose sight of the reason why you have
come here. It is not that you may get something by which to earn your
bread, but that every mouthful of bread may be the sweeter to your
taste."

And this is the power possessed by the mighty dead,--men of every time
and nation, whose voices death cannot silence, who are waiting even at
the poor man's elbow, whose illuminating words may be had for the price
of a day's work in the kitchen or the street, for lack of love of whom
many a luxurious home is a dull and solitary spot, breeding misery and
vice. Now the modern college is especially equipped to introduce its
students to such literature. The library is at last understood to be
the heart of the college. The modern librarian is not the keeper of
books, as was his predecessor, but the distributer of them, and the
guide to their resources, proud when he increases the use of his
treasures. Every language, ancient or modern, which contains a
literature is now taught in college. Its history is examined, its
philology, its masterpieces, and more than ever is English literature
studied and loved. There is now every opportunity for the college
student to become an expert in the use of his own tongue and pen. What
other men painfully strive for he can enjoy to the full with
comparatively little effort.

But there is a second invigorating interest to which college training
introduces its student. I mean the study of nature, intimacy with the
strange and beautiful world in which we live. "Nature never did betray
the heart that loved her," sang her poet high priest. When the world
has been too much with us, nothing else is so refreshing to tired eyes
and mind as woods and water, and an intelligent knowledge of the life
within them. For a generation past there has been a well-nigh universal
turning of the population toward the cities. In 1840 only nine per
cent of our people lived in cities of 8,000 inhabitants or more. Now
more than a third of us are found in citi