Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/39

1867&#93; Who shapes a word before the fancy cools,

As lonely Crusoe had to forge his tools.

I liked the tale, 't was like so many told

By Rutebeuf and his brother Trouvères bold;

Nor were the hearers much unlike to theirs,

Men unsophisticate, rude-nerved as bears.

Ezra is gone and his large-hearted kind,

The landlords of the hospitable mind;

Good Warriner of Springfield was the last

An inn is now a vision of the past;

One yet-surviving host my mind recalls,—

You 'll find him if you go to Trenton Falls."



 A PLEA FOR CULTURE.

HEODORE PARKER somewhere says that in America every one gets a mouthful of education, but scarcely any one a full meal. It seems the defect of some of our recent debates on this subject, that, instead of remedying the starvation, the reformers propose to deduct from the dinner. The disputants appear to agree in assuming that an average Senior Sophister is a plethoric monster of learning, and that something must be done to take him down. For this end, some plan to remove his Greek and Latin, others his German, others again his mathematics,—all assuming it as a thing not to be tolerated, that one small head should carry all he knows.

Yet surely it needs but little actual observation of our college boys, in their more unguarded moments,—at the annual regatta, for instance, or among the young ladies on Class Day,—to mitigate the intensity of these fears. The Class Orator does not always impress us with any bewildering accumulation of mental attainments; nor does the head of the Lazy Club appear to possess more of any branch of letters than he can hope, by reasonable non-industry, to forget within a single year. Because the standard of acquirement has been raised within a quarter of a century, it does not follow that it is now very high, for our so-called universities were once but high-schools, and it was no uncommon thing for boys to graduate with honor at seventeen. I can easily recall three successive Harvard classes in which this happened. In one class, the first and second scholars were of this unripe age; in another class, the second scholar; while in the intermediate class a student obtained very respectable rank, though graduating at sixteen. Honors thus obtained were the honors of school-boys, and showed a boyish standard of attainment; they gave no guaranty of real merit; they implied nothing which it was not a disgrace to our culture to call scholarship. Yet academic laurels like these, with a year or two of professional study superadded, were all that America had then to give. He who wished for more must exile himself to find it, or must supply, as he best could, by solitary effort and with little encouragement, what should have been urged and pressed upon him by the full force of some great institution. To say that later years have amended these things a little, is to say something; but the mass of our colleges are now where the highest then were. The advance in the means of education thus afforded in America bears no comparison with the advance in material wealth.