Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/87

Rh with more than four thousand students and nearly two hundred professors and instructors, where relations must be largely impersonal. Without any discussion of the general argument, it would seem as if the college known to Emerson, Thoreau and Lowell was scarcely noted for this intimate acquaintance or, in fact, for individual insight or foresight. Undoubtedly, Edward Channing, Ticknor, Longfellow, and later, Lowell, as professors, became interested in many students with fine mentality and gave incentive to individual development, yet their examples seem sufficiently rare to be given special reference. Edward Everett Hale, who was graduated from Harvard the year after Thoreau, has given some interesting reminiscences of the class-room atmosphere in "A New England Boyhood" and also in "James Russell Lowell and his Friends." He recalls the favorite and apt term, seminary, usually employed by President Quincy when speaking of the college. In the narrow curriculum, Greek, Latin, and mathematics formed staple products, with "modern language days" three times a week. Of these so-called "voluntaries," a student must choose, at the beginning, German, French, Italian, or Spanish, and maintain his chosen language without change for four terms. As further discouragement to modern "