Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/844



HEREUNTO shall I liken Upsala, and unto what shall I compare it? It is a university which unites many institutions, European and American. Its lofty halls—for Upsala means "lofty halls"—look down on a little city, as Cornell looks down on Ithaca. Its oneness with the town reminds the visitor of Williams, Dartmouth, or Oberlin. Its series of "student nations" houses suggest the fraternity houses of Amherst and the society halls of Yale. The dominance which it exercises over the town through students and professors reminds one of the power of Michigan at Ann Arbor or of Wisconsin at Madison. Its rich historic past is an intimation of the place that Harvard fills in the annals of Massachusetts and Yale of Connecticut. If I were to pass over the seas, I should compare Upsala to St. Andrews, for it has, like that university, held up the lamp of truth in the northern wet and cold for more than four hundred years. Or I might liken it to Oxford or Cambridge, for the university is the town and the town is the university. Or it might be compared to a German university by reason of its similarity in administration and origin. But when one has sounded all the comparisons, he will conclude simply by saying that—Upsala is Upsala.

The Upsala of the present has come out of a past which, like its present, unites the glories and the struggles of many forces and fortunes. The town itself is replete with mythologies and tra-