"I use the term college in the American sense. This, not for the poor purpose of ministering to national vanity, but because we must needs take things as they are; and for the further reason that there is much to commend in the shape the institution here assumes. It has hardly its prototype either in the Fatherland or on the Continent. It has but a partial resemblance either to the German Gymnasia or to the English preparatory schools, as of Eton and Rugby. As preliminary to professional study, it is in some respects far in advance of these. It differs materially, at once from the German and English University, and from the college as embraced in the latter. University education in Europe was once somewhat rigidly divided into two portions; the one designed to form the mind for whatever sphere of life; the other, the Brodstudium, as the Germans significantly term it, a course of training for some particular profession. Long ago, however, this division became mainly obsolete. 'On the continent,' said an eminent English scholar, some years since, 'the preparatory education has been dropped; among ourselves, the professional.' He speaks, of course, comparatively. So far as England is concerned, the same testimony is borne by a well-informed recent observer. This ancient and wise division is by us still maintained; with this peculiarity, that the 'preparatory' education, so-called,—by which is meant the highest form of it,—is the sole work of the colleges. Professional culture is remitted to other and often separate schools. The undergraduate course is for general training; it lays the foundation for whatever superstructure. It has no particular reference to any one pursuit; but, like the first part of the old University course, aims to fit the whole man for a man's work in any specific line either of study or of action.

"In this conception of the college, there are, it is believed, important advantages. It is better for preparatory education; it is better for professional. It felicitously discriminates. It keeps things in their place. It defines and duly magnifies each of the two great departments of the educational process. It is likelier to dig deep, and build on broad and solid rock; it tends to symmetry and finish in the superincumbent fabric.

"The college should be marked by a completeness. Rejecting the fragmentary and the unfinished, the well constituted mind ever craves this. Modern thought, especially, is passing from an excessive nominalism to a more realistic habit; by many a broad induction, from mere details to a rounded whole: And nowhere more persistently than in relation to institutions. The college should be complete as to its objective scheme. There may be onesidedness here. There may be, for example, an excessive or ill-directed pressing of utilities, as in the speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer; or there may be an undue exaltation of what he calls 'the decorative element.' The theoretic maybe too exclusively pursued; or there may be a practicalness which has too little of theory, like a cone required to stand firm on its apex. There should be completeness, also, as touching the subjective aim. It should embrace, in a word, the whole man, and that not in his Edenic aspects alone, but as a fallen being. You may not overlook even the physical; the casket not merely, holding all the mental and moral treasures—the frame-work rather, to which by subtile ties the invisible machinery is linked, and which upholds it as it works. The world has yet to learn fully how dependent is the inner upon the outer man, and how greatly the highest achievements of scholarship are facilitated by proper hygienic conditions. As you pass to the intellectual, it matters little what classification you adopt, whether with the author of the 'Novum Organum,' in his 'Advancement of Learning,' you resolve all the powers into those of memory, imagination, and reason, or whether the minuter divisions of a more recent philosophy are preferred; only be sure that not a single faculty is overlooked or disparaged. Be it presentative, conservative, reproductive, representative, elaborative, regulative, or whatever the fine Hamiltonian analysis may suggest, give it its proper place and its proper scope.

"The college should be distinctly and eminently Christian. Not in the narrow, sectarian sense—that be far from us—but in the broadest evangelical view. Our course of thought culminates here; and here does all else that has been affirmed find its proper centre and unity. Christianity is the great unity. In it, as was intimated at the outset, are all the chief elements of organic influence. It is itself the very acme of completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces; by a felicitous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, ensuring to human nature its proper orbit. It is the golden girdle wherewith every institution like this should bind her garments of strength and beauty about her.

"Were it needful to argue this point, we might put it on the most absolute grounds. All things are Christ's; all dominions, dignities, potences; it is especially meet that we say, to-day, all institutions. It is the grossest wrong practically to hold otherwise. It is loss, too, and nowhere more palpably than in the educational sphere. It is no cant saying to affirm, and that in a more than merely spiritual sense, that in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' At his throne the lines of all science terminate; above all, the science that has man for its subject. Of all history, for example, rightly read, how is He the burden and the glory! Otherwise taken, it is a more than Cretan labyrinth. The Christian spirit, besides, raising the soul to the loftiest planes of thought, giving it the highest communions, bringing before it the grandest objects, and securing to all its machinery the most harmonious action, is eminently conducive to intellectual achievement. We have already said something like this as touching moral culture; but that, be it ever remembered, takes its proper form and direction only as it is vitally linked with Christianity. What God has joined together let not man put asunder. Let the studies which we call moral, have all a Christian baptism; and, with all our getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still investigated, not as a brute force, or in a merely intellectual light, but in those high spiritual aspects in which our great New England metaphysician delighted to present it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of analogy, bridge, to the forming mind, the chasm between natural and revealed religion. Let the Christian Evidences be fully unfolded. We can hardly dispense with them in an age, when by means of 'Westminster Reviews,' and other subtle organs of infidelity, the old mode of assault being abandoned, a sapping and mining process is continually going forward. Let Ethical Science,—embracing in its wide sweep the Economy of Private Life, the Philosophy of Government, and Law, which 'hath its seat in the bosom of God,'—be all bathed in the light of Calvary. That light is its life. 'Let us with caution indulge the supposition,' said the Father of our country, 'that morality can be maintained without religion.' Let the Bible be included among our text-books as the sun is included in the solar system; and let all the rest revolve in planetary subjection about it. Let it be studied, not in a professional, much less in a partisan way; but with the conviction that it is indispensable to the broadest culture; that without theology we have but a straitened anthropology; that we see not nature aright, but as we look up through it to Nature's God. Be ours, in its largest significance, the sentiment so devoutly uttered by the old Hebrew bard: 'In Thy light shall we see light.' And let the discipline of college, so intimately connected with its prosperity, be fashioned on the model of the Gospel. Let it copy, in its way and measure, the wondrous harmonies of the redemptive scheme, in which 'mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.' So shall it bless our halls with some faint reflection of the Divine fatherhood, and give to our society some happy resemblance to a Christian family."

A prominent feature of President Smith's administration was a greater utilization of the libraries, and the opening of a reading-room. The librarian says:

"The late Professor Alphaeus Crosby contributed considerably to the increase of the classical books, and Hon. Nathan Crosby has recently furnished the means for commencing a collection of the works of Dartmouth alumni. It is intended to gather all books and pamphlets which have been written by graduates. The collection will also include matter relating to them and to the work of the college.

"In reviewing the history of the library their number is so great that it is impossible to mention even a small part of the benefactors; their best record is in the well filled shelves and the large amount of reading done in connection with the studies of the college course.

"One of the departments of the library consists of the books given by the late General Sylvanus Thayer, founder of the school of engineering, numbering 2,000 volumes.

"Early in its history the members of the Chandler Scientific Department founded the 'Philotechnic Society,' the library of which, together with some books belonging to the department, contains 1,700 volumes.

"The three society libraries continued under separate management until 1874, although the societies, as far as literary work is concerned, had for some time given way to the secret societies, and the interest in them was so slight that only with great difficulty could a quorum be obtained for ordinary business. During that year an arrangement was made by which the three society libraries were placed under the same management as the library of the college, the latter receiving the society taxes which were slightly reduced, assuming all expenses including the support of the reading-room, and providing for the increase of the library by books to be annually selected by the Senior class. Under this arrangement the different libraries have been brought together and considered as departments of one, the hours for drawing and consulting books have been increased from three hours per week in the society libraries and six in the college, to twenty-one hours per week, and in many respects the facilities for use have been greatly increased. Since 1870, the yearly additions for all the libraries have averaged 700 volumes, and they at present contain exclusive of pamphlets about 45,000 volumes, besides nearly 5,000 books which are either duplicates or worthless. These figures are independent of the Astronomical library located at the Observatory, the library of the 'Society of Inquiry,' and of the libraries of the Medical and Agricultural departments, which will probably be connected with the main library. The library as it is now constituted is well adapted to the work of the college, and is especially so in some of the departments of instruction, in connection with which a large amount of reading is done. There are in use at present three printed catalogues: one of the college library, printed in 1868; one of the 'Social Friends' library, dated 1859; and one of the 'United Fraternity' library, issued in 1861. These are supplemented by a card catalogue arranged under title, author, and subject."

The "Centennial" celebration of the founding of the college, at the Commencement of 1869, was a season of rare interest and profit to the very large number of alumni and friends of the college assembled from nearly every quarter of the globe.

The following is the substance of the address of Chief Justice Chase, who presided on the occasion, as given by Mr. William H. Duncan:

"He began by alluding to the fact that the college received its charter from 'our right trusty and well beloved John Wentworth, Governor of the Province of New Hampshire,' and said that the venerable name was 'borne, to-day, by an honored citizen of Illinois,[36] who, like his ancestor, towered head and shoulders above his fellow men. He also happily referred to the descendants of the other founders of the college. 'When the college was organized the third George was heir to the British throne. Under the great Empress Catherine, Russia was prosecuting that career of aggrandizement then begun which is even now menacing British empire in the East. Under the fifteenth Louis, in France, that wonderful literary movement was in progress, which prepared a sympathetic enthusiasm for liberty in America, at length overthrowing, for a time, monarchy in France. China and Japan were wholly outside the modern community of nations. A hundred years have passed, and what a new order has arisen! Great Britain has lost an empire, has gained other empires in Asia and Australia, and extends her dominion around the globe. France, so great in arts and arms, has seen an empire rise and fall and another empire arise, in which a wise and skillful ruler is seeking to reconcile personal supremacy with democratic ideas. Russia, our old friend, seems to withdraw, for the present, at least, her eager gaze from Constantinople and seeks to establish herself on the Pacific Ocean and in Central Asia. China sends one of our own citizens, Mr. Burlingame, on an embassy throughout the world to establish peaceful, commercial, and industrial relations with all the civilized nations. Japan, too, awakes to the necessity of a more liberal policy, and looks toward a partnership in modern civilization. Who, seeing this, and reflecting on the manifold agencies at work in the old world and the prodigious movements in the new, which I cannot even glance at, can help exclaiming, in the language of the first telegraphic message which was sent to America, 'What hath God wrought?' How great a part has this college, antedating the Republic, played in all the enterprises of America! It has been well said of it that three quarters of the globe know the graduates of Dartmouth. Every State in the Union, certainly, is familiar with their names and their works, and the influence which they exert is the influence of this college. What an insignificant beginning was that which has been described, to-day;—what splendid progress! How great the present, and who can predict the future? Ninety-eight classes of young men have already gone forth from this institution. Who can measure the religious, the moral, the intellectual, the political influence, which they have exerted? Great names like Webster and Choate rise at once to memory, but I refer more particularly to the mighty influence exerted by the vast numbers, unrecognized upon the theatre of national reputation, which the college has sent into all the spheres of activity and duty. When I think of the vast momentum for good which has originated here, and is now in unchecked progress, and must extend beyond all the limits of conception, I cannot help feeling that it is a great and precious privilege to be in some way identified as a member of this college. It does not diminish my satisfaction that other graduates of other American colleges can say the same thing. It rather increases the satisfaction. Glad and thankful that my name is in the list of those who have been educated here, and have endeavored to do something for their country and their kind, I rejoice that, under our beneficent institutions, legions of Americans have the same or greater cause for gladness.'

[36] Hon. John Wentworth, LL. D.

"After some remarks to the graduating class, the Chief Justice said: 'And let me add, my brethren of the alumni, a practical word to you. We celebrate to-day the founding of our college. We come hither to testify our veneration and our affection for our benign Alma Mater. We can hardly think she is a hundred years old, she looks so fresh and so fair. We are sure that many, many blessed days are before her, but a mother's days are made happy and delightful by the love and faithfulness of her children. Much has been done for this institution, recently, much which makes our hearts glad. The names of the benefactors of the institution, mentioned here to-day, dwell freshly in the hearts of every graduate, and will live forever; but let us remember, that while much has been done, much also remains to be done. I do not appeal to you for charity. I wish that every graduate may feel that the college is, in a most true and noble sense, his mother, and to remind you of your filial obligations.'"

Addresses having been made by Hon. Ira Perley, LL. D., Hon. Daniel Clark, and Richard B. Kimball, Esq., Mr. Duncan says:

"Judge Chase called upon Judge Barrett, Vice President of the Association of the Alumni, to read a poem, which had been furnished for the occasion by George Kent, Esq., of the Class of 1814. He had read but a few stanzas when the rumbling of distant thunder was heard. Then came a few scattering drops of water pattering upon the roof of the tent, but soon the winds blew, and the rain descended and fell upon the roof, as if the very windows of heaven had been opened. There followed such a scene as no tongue, nor pen, nor pencil can describe,—it baffles all description. Judge Barrett, with the true pluck of an Ethan Allen, stood by his colors, and the more the wind blew and the storm raged, the louder he read his poetry. But he was obliged at length to cease, and with his slouched hat and dripping garments left the stage.

"But he was not alone in his misery. The manly and stately form of the Chief Justice, the president of the college, reverend doctors of divinity, were all in the same condition—they all stood drenched and dripping, like fountains, in the rain. Even General Sherman had to succumb, once in his life, and seek the protection of an umbrella. Some huddled under umbrellas, some held benches over their heads, and some crept beneath the platform.

"The storm passed over, and Judge Barrett came forward and finished reading the poem.

"Hon. James W. Patterson, of the Class of 1848, was then called upon, and spoke with force and eloquence, receiving the greatest compliment that could be paid him,—the undivided attention of the audience."

Addresses were also made by Dr. Jabez B. Upham, Samuel H. Taylor, LL. D., Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., and others.

We quote some of the closing passages of the "Historical Address" by President Brown, of Hamilton College.

"There is not much time to speak of the general policy of the college through these hundred years of its life, but I may say in brief, that it has been sound and earnest, conservative and aggressive at the same time. As the motto on its seal,—vox clamantis in deserto,—indicated and expressed the religious purpose of its founders, so this purpose has never been lost sight of. Through lustrum after lustrum, and generation after generation, while classes have succeeded classes, while one corps of instructors have passed away and others have taken their places, this high purpose of presenting and enforcing the vital and essential truths of the Christian religion, has never been forgotten or neglected. The power of Christianity in modifying, inspiring, and directing the energies of modern civilization,—its art, its literature, its commerce, its laws, its government, has been profoundly felt. Nor has it for a moment been forgotten that education, to be truly and in the largest degree beneficent, must also be religious,—must affect that which is deepest in man,—must lead him, if it can, to the contemplation of truths most personal, central, and essential, must open to him some of those depths where the soul swings almost helplessly in the midst of experiences and powers unfathomable and infinite,—where the intellect falters and hesitates and finds no solution of its perplexities till it yields to faith. Within later years there have been those who have advocated the doctrine that education should be entirely secular,—that the college should have nothing to do with religious counsels or advice. Now while I do not think that this would be easy, as our colleges are organized, without leaving or even inciting the mind to dangerous skepticism, nor possible but by omitting the most powerful means of moral and intellectual discipline, nor without depriving the soul of that food which it specially craves, and destitute of which it will grow lean, hungry, and unsatisfied,—as a matter of history, no such theory of education has found favorable response among the guardians of Dartmouth. At the same time while the general religious character of the college has been well ascertained and widely recognized, while the great truths of our common Christianity have been fully and frankly and earnestly brought to the notice of intelligent and inquiring minds, it has not been with a narrow, illiberal, and proselyting spirit, not so as rudely to violate traditionary beliefs, not so as to wound and repel any sincere and truth loving mind. And this is the consistent and sound position for the college to hold.

"With respect to its curriculum of studies the position of the college has been equally wise. She has endeavored to make her course as broad, generous, and thorough as possible; equal to the best in the land; so that her students could feel that no privilege has been denied them which any means at her disposal could provide. She has endeavored wisely to apportion the elements of instruction and discipline. She has provided as liberally as possible, by libraries, apparatus, laboratories, and cabinets for increase in positive knowledge. She has equally insisted on those exact studies which compel subtleness and precision of thought, which habituate the mind to long trains of controlled reasoning, which discipline alike the attention and the will, the conservative and the elaborative powers. She has given full honor to the masterpieces of human language and human thought, through which, while we come to a more complete knowledge of peoples and nations, of poetry and eloquence, we feel more profoundly the life of history, and comprehend the changes of custom and thought, while the finer and more subtle powers of fancy and imagination stir within the sensitive mind, and gradually by constant and imperceptible inspiration lift the soul to regions of larger beauty and freedom.

"So may she ever hold on her way, undeluded by specious promises of easier methods, inuring her students to toil as the price of success; not rigid and motionless, but plastic and adapting herself to the necessities of different minds; yet never confounding things that differ, nor vainly hoping on a narrow basis of culture to rear the superstructure of the broadest attainment and character, but ever determined to make her instructions the most truly liberal and noble.

"With no purpose of personal advantage, but with the deepest filial love and gratitude have we assembled this day. Of all professions and callings, from many States, from public business and from engrossing private pursuits,—you, my young friend who have just come, with hesitation and ingenuous fear, to add your name if you may, to the honored rolls of the college, and you Sir,[37] whose memory runs back to the beginning of the century, the oldest or nearly the oldest living alumnus of the college, the contemporary of Chapman and Harvey, and Fletcher, and Parris, and Weston, and Webster,—you who came from beyond the 'Father of Waters,' and you who have retreated for a moment from the shore of the dark Atlantic—you Sir,[38] our brother by hearty and affectionate adoption, who led our armies in that memorable march from the mountain to the sea, which shall be remembered as long as the march of the Ten Thousand, and repeated in story and song as long as history and romance shall be written, and you, Sir, who hold the even scales of justice in that august tribunal, from which Marshall proclaimed the law which insured to us our ancient name and rights and privileges, unchanged, untarnished, unharmed,—all of us, my brothers, with one purpose have come up to lay our trophies at the feet of our common mother, to deck her with fresh garlands, to rejoice in her prosperity, and to promise her our perpetual homage and love. Let no word of ours ever give her pain or sorrow. Loyal to our heart of hearts, may we minister so far as we can, to her wants, may we be jealous of her honor, and solicitous for her prosperity. May no ruthless hand ever hereafter be lifted against her. May no unholy jealousies rend the fair fabric of her seamless garment. May no narrow or unworthy spirit mar the harmony of her wise counsels. May she stand to the end as she ever has stood, for the Church and State, a glory and a defense. And above all and in order to all, may the spirit of God in full measure rest upon her; 'the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.'"

[37] Job Lyman, Esq., of the class of 1804.

[38] General Sherman received the highest honorary degree of the college in 1866.

President Smith, whose character was a rare union of energy and gentleness, was pre-eminently a man of affairs.

The results of his untiring efforts to promote the welfare of the college, in various directions, will be more fully developed upon subsequent pages. Having performed valuable service for thirteen years, he resigned his office, on account of failing health, March 1, 1877, and died on the sixteenth of August following, his wife, Mrs. Sarah Ann (Adams) Smith, surviving him.



CHAPTER XIX.

INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT BARTLETT.

Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., of the Chicago Theological Seminary, was elected the eighth president of the college. We insert entire his inaugural address, delivered at the Commencement, June, 1877:

"Certain occasions seem to prescribe their own themes of discourse, and certain themes are endowed with perpetual life. There are problems with which each coming generation and each last man grapples as freshly as the first.

"How shall the ripest growth of the ages be imparted to one young soul? Twice, at least, in a lifetime, is this great question wont to rise solemnly before each thoughtful man—when he looks forward in youthful hope, and when he looks back in parental solicitude. It is a question of many forms and multiplying answers. Shall there be a long, fundamental training, wide and general? or, shall it be closely professional? Shall it be predominantly classic, or scientific, or esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive "nines" not known on Helicon, and challenge British Oxford, alas? with its boat crew? Shall the American College student follow his option, or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches? or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the Concord sage,—'You send your son to the schoolmasters, and the schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the whole tone of the institution?

"In these and other forms is the same fundamental question still thrust sharply before us. I do not propose to move directly on such a line of bristling bayonets, but to make my way by a flank movement across this "wilderness" of conflict. It will go far towards determining the methods of a liberal education, if we first ascertain, as I propose to do, The Chief Elements of a Manly Culture.

"Obviously the primal condition of all else must be found in a self-prompted activity or wakefulness of intellect. The time when the drifting faculties begin to feel the helm of will, when the youth passes from being merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the first remove from the tohu va-vohu was when the Spirit of God brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic. It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round restlessly by a yearning instinct; it may be driven by the strong impulse of native genius; or, it may rise to the condition of being the facile servant of the forceful will. When the boy at Pisa curiously watches the oil lamp swinging by its long chain in the cathedral, a pendulum begins to vibrate in his brain, and falling bodies to count off their intervals; and when afterward he deliberately fits two lenses in a leaden tube, the moon's mountains, Jupiter's satellites, and Saturn's rings are all waiting to catch his eye. A thoughtful meditation on the spasms of a dead frog's leg in Bologna becomes galvanic. The gas breaking on the surface of a brewery vat, well watched by Priestley, bursts forth into pneumatic chemistry. A spider's web in the Duke of Devonshire's garden expands in the mind of my lord's gardener, Brown, into a suspension bridge. A sledge hammer, well swung in Cromarty, opened those New Walks in an Old Field. The diffraction of light revealed itself to Young in the hues of a soap-bubble. As the genie of the oriental tale unfolded his huge height from the bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, so the career of Davy first evolved itself out of old vials and gallipots. When the boy Bowditch was found in all his leisure moments snatching up his slate and pencil, when Cobbett grappled resolutely with the grammar, when Cuvier dissected the cuttlefish found upon the shore, or Scott was seen sitting on a ladder, hour after hour, poring over books, they will be further heard from.

"If such instances illustrate the propulsive force of native genius, they also indicate what training must do when the impulsive genius is not there. No idler plea was ever entered for an idler than when he says,—'I have no bent for this, no interest in that, and no genius for the other.' The animal has his habitat, and stays fast. A complete man is intellectually and physically a cosmopolite. Till he has gained the power to throw his will-force wherever the work summons him, most of all to the weak points of his condition, till he has learned to be his own task-master and overseer, he is but a 'slave of the ring.'

"In most lines the highest gift is the gift of toil. Indeed, men of genius have often been the most terrible of toilers, and in the regions of highest art. How have the great masters of music first welded the keys of the organ and harpsichord to their fingers' ends and their souls' nerves before they poured forth the Creation or the Messiah, the symphonies and sonatas! Think of Meyerbeer and his fifteen hours of daily work; of Mozart's incessant study of the masters, and his own eight hundred compositions in his short life; of Mendelssohn's nine years elaboration of Elijah. Or in the sister art, how we track laborious, continuous study in the Peruginesque, the Florentine, and the Roman styles successively of Raphael, and in the incredible activity that crowded a life of thirty-seven years with such a vast number of portraits and Madonnas, of altar-pieces and frescoes, mythological, historical, and Biblical. And that still grander contemporary genius, how he wrought by night with the candle in his pasteboard cap, how he had dissected and studied the human frame like an anatomist or surgeon before he chiseled the David and Moses, or painted the Sistine chapel, and how the plannings of his busy brain were always in advance of the powers of a hand that, till the age of eighty-eight, was incessantly at work.

"The servant is not above his master. The lower intellect can buy at no cheaper price than the higher, and the hour of full intellectual emancipation comes only when the student has learned to serve—to turn the whole freshness and sharpness of his intellect on any needful theme of the hour; it may be the scale of a fossil fish, or the annual movement of a glacier, the disclosures of the spectrum, or the secrets of the arrow-headed tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His emancipation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the titanic scholarship of Germany. It stood embodied in the life and motto of the aged, matchless artist Angelo,—'Ancora imparo,' I am learning still.

"But impulse and activity may move blindly. Another cardinal quality of such a culture, therefore, must be precision—the close, clean working of the faculties. A memory trained to clear recollection, what a saving of reiterated labor and of annoying helplessness. A discrimination sharpened to the nicest discernment of things that differ, though always a shining mark for the arrow of the satirist, will outlive all shots with his gray-goose shaft; for it shines with the gleam of tempered steel. An exactness of knowledge that defines all its landmarks, how is it master of the situation. A precision of speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,—'They are a continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had 'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook, scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual Sing-Sing for the culprit!

"How refreshing, on the other hand, to follow the clear unfolding of the silken threads of thought that lie side by side, single and in knots and skeins, but never tangled. What a beautiful process was an investigation by Faraday in electro-magnetism, as he combined his apparatus, manipulated his material, narrowed his search, eliminated his sources of error, and drew his careful conclusions. With similar persistent acuteness, in the field of Biblical investigation, how does Zumpt, by an exhaustive exclusion and combination, at length make the annals of Tacitus shake hands with the gospel of Luke over the taxing of Cyrenius. In metaphysics, how matchless the razor-like acuteness with which Hamilton could distinguish, divide, and clear up the questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of perception. What can be more admirable than the workings of the trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of day;—it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case, shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.

"It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times, because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual diversity. They proceed not by analytical incision, but by summary excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!' What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends, and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure ether, or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and mysterious thing, life, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth of folly? And how such a central paralysis of the mental retina spreads its darkness, as, for example, in the affirmation that as oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are water, ammonia, and carbolic acid convertible into and resolvable from living protoplasm!—a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if need be, work a week to correct in his trial balance the variation of a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait and Thompson pronounce it 'utterly impossible' to grant more than ten, or, at most, fifteen millions,—this poor, benighted clerk is bound to sit and hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that reckon with a lee-way of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?

"Brilliancy, so-called, is no equivalent or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech, and not on a logical proposition. The well-known story se non vero e ben trovato, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all that?" "No, but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.

"The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some great discussion, heads for a fog-bank or a wind-mill. When a man proposes to chronicle a 'Conflict between Religion and Science,' and makes religion stand indiscriminately for Romanism, Mohammedanism, superstition, malignant passion, obstinate prejudice, and what not, also confounding Christianity with so-called Christians, and those often most unrepresentative,—at the same time appropriating to 'Science' all intellectual activity whatever, though found in good Christian men, and though fostered and made irrepressible by the fire of that very religion, it is easy to see what must be the outcome of such a sweepstakes race. There will be a deification of science, and not even a whited sepulchre erected over the measureless Golgothas of its slaughtered theories. There will be, on the other hand, the steady suppressio veri concerning books, systems, men, and events, the occasional though unintended assertio falsi, the eager conversion of theories into facts, constructions unfair and uncandid and, throughout, with much that is bright and just, that 'admixture of a lie that doth ever add pleasure' to its author and grief to the judicious. Such confusions are no doubt often the outgrowth of the will. But a main end of a true culture is to prevent or expose all such bewilderments, whether helpless or crafty.

"The great predominance of the disciplinary process was what once characterized the English university system even more than now. It consisted in the exact and exhaustive mastery of certain limited sections of knowledge and thought, as the gymnastic for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make answer. The whole massive literature of England shall respond.

"But to this precision of working must be furnished material with which to work. Mental fullness is, therefore, another prime quality of a manly culture. To what degree it should be sought in the curriculum has been in dispute. It is the American theory, and a growing belief of the English nation, that the British universities have been defective here. Their men of mark have traveled later over the broader field.

"Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone to beat the air. Behold in some national patent-office a grand mummy-pit of ignorant inventors.

"Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the Schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them have been well called, by Hallam, men 'of extraordinary powers of discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to examine.' 'If these Schoolmen,' says Bacon, 'to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all learning and knowledge.' And so, for lack of other timber, they split hairs. Hence the mass of ponderous trifling that has made their name a by-word. A force, sometimes Herculean, was spent in building and demolishing castles of moonshine.

"A robust mental strength requires various and solid food. The best growth is symmetrical. There is a common bond—quoddam commune vinculum—in the circle of knowledge, that cannot be overlooked. Men do not know best what they know only in its isolation. Even Kant offset his metaphysics by lecturing on geography; and Niebuhr, the historian, struggled hard and well to keep his equilibrium by throwing himself into the whole circle of natural science and of affairs. Such, also, are the interdependencies of scholarship, that ample knowledge without our specialty is needful to save us from blunders within. Olshausen was a brilliant commentator, and the slightest tinge of chemistry should have kept him from suggesting that the conversion of water into wine at Cana was but the acceleration of a natural process. A smattering of optics would have prevented Dr. Williams from repeating the old cavil of Voltaire, that light could not have been made before the sun. A moderate reflection upon the laws of speech and the method of Genesis would have restrained Huxley from sneering at the 'marvelous flexibility' of the Hebrew tongue in the word 'day,' and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Muller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions, the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have ever existed,' says an idealist,—'Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton,—were well read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had the means of knowing the opposite opinion.'

"While every year increases the impossibility of what used to be called universal knowledge, it also emphasizes the necessity of a scholarship that has its outlook toward all the vast provinces of reading and thought. It cannot conquer them, but it can be on treaty relations with them. The tendency of modern science is, of necessity, steadily toward sectional lines and division of labor. It is a tendency whose cramping influence is as steadily to be resisted, even in later life, much more in early training. We are to form ourselves on the model of the integer rather than the fraction of humanity. The metaphysician cannot afford to be ignorant of the 'chemistry of a candle' or the 'history of a piece of chalk,' nor the chemist of the laws of language, the theologian of astronomy and geology, nor the lawyer of the most ancient code and its history. Mill himself made complaint of Comte's 'great aberration' in ignoring psychology and logic.

"Intellectual fetichism is born of isolation, and dies hard. While in the great modern uprising we may boast that the heathen idols have been swept away from three hundred dark islands of Polynesia, new 'idols of the cave' stalk forth upon the world of civilized thought. We are just now much bewildered with brightness in streaks, which falls on us like the sunlight from a boy's bit of glass, and blinds our eyes instead of showing our path. Half-educated persons seize fragments of principles and snatch at half-truths. Crotchets infest the brains, and hobbies career through the fields of thought. Polyphemus is after us, a burly wretch with one eye. Better if that were out.

"The remedy is, to correct our narrowness by a clear view of the wide expanse. We must come out of our cave. We must link our pursuits to those of humanity. Breadth and robustness given to the mental constitution in its early training shall go far through life to save us from partial paralysis or monstrosity.

"To insure this result, however, we must add to that fullness of material the quality of mental equipoise or mastery, the power of grasping and managing it all. A man is to possess, and not to be 'possessed with,' his acquisitions. He wants an intellect decisive, incisive, and, if I might coin a word, concisive.

"The power to unify and organize must go with all right acquisition. Knowledges must be changed to knowledge. It takes force to handle weight. Some men seem to know more than is healthy for them. It does not make muscle, but becomes plethoric, dropsical, adipose, or adipocere. Better to have thought more and acquired less. Frederick W. Robertson, in his prime, wrote,—'I will answer for it that there are few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have;' and Mrs. Browning confessed,—'I should be wiser if I had not read half as much;' while old Hobbes, of Malmesbury, caustically remarked,—'If I had read as much as other men I should know as little.' It may serve as a hint to the omnivorous college student. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew, it is said, more than a hundred languages. What came of it all? A eulogy on one Emanuele da Ponte. He never said anything in all the languages he spoke! What constitutes the life of an intellectual jelly-fish? Even the brilliancy of Macaulay was almost overweighted by the immensity of his acquisitions. The vivid glitter of details in his memory may sometimes have dazzled his perception of a tout ensemble, and for principles it was his manner to cite precedents. A multitude of lesser lights have been almost smothered by superabundance of fuel. A man knows Milton almost by heart, and Shakespeare too, can quote pages of Homer, has read Chrysostom for his recreation, is full of history, runs over with statistics right and left, and withal is strong in mother-wit. But the mother-wit proves not strong enough, perhaps, to push forth and show itself over the ponderous debris above it, the enormousness, or, if you please, the enormity of his knowledge.

"It requires a first-class mind to carry a vast load of scientific facts. Hence the many eminent observers who have been the most illogical of reasoners. What a contrast between Hugh Miller and his friend Francia; the mind of the latter, as Miller describes it, 'a labyrinth without a clew, in whose recesses was a vast amount of book-knowledge that never could be used, and was of no use to himself or any one else;' the former wielding all his stores as he swung his sledge. What is wanted is the comprehensive hand, and not the prehensile tail.

"Involved in such an equipoise is the decisiveness, the willforce, that not only holds, but holds the balance. Common as it may be, it is none the less pitiable to be just acute enough constantly to question, but not to answer—forever to raise difficulties, and never to solve them. Wakeful, but the wakefulness of weakliness. Fine-strung minds are they often, acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the light. It is by nature rather a German than an Anglo-Saxon habit. It is not always fatal even there. De Wette, 'the veteran doubter,' rallied at the last, and, like Bunyan's Feeble-mind, went over almost shouting. In this country, youth often have it somewhat later than the measles and the small-pox, and come through very well, without even a pock-mark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, and assumes a languid or typhoidal cast,—not Positivism, but Agnosticism. It is rather fashionable to eulogize perplexity and doubt as a mark of strength and genius. But whatever may be the passing fashion, the collective judgment of the ages has settled it that the permanent state of mental hesitancy and indecision, in whatever sphere of thought and action, is and must be a false condition. It indicates the scrofulous diathesis, and calls for more iron in the blood. It is a lower type of manhood. It abdicates the province of a human intelligence, which is to seek and find truth. It abrogates the moral obligation to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. It revolts from the great problem of life, which calls on us to know, and to know that we may do. Out upon this apotheosis of doubt. It is the sick man glorying in his infirmity, the beggar boasting of his intellectual rags.

"The comprehensive and decisive tend naturally to the incisive. The power to take a subject by its handle and poise it on its centre is perhaps the consummation of merely intellectual culture. When all its nutriment has been converted into bone and muscle and sinew and nerve, then the mind bounds to its work, lithe and strong, like a hunting leopard on its game. It was exactly the power with which our Webster handled his case, till it seemed to the farmer too simple to require a great man to argue. It was the quality that Lincoln so toiled at through his early manhood, and so admirably gained,—the power of presenting things clearly to 'plain people.' You may call it 'the art of putting things,' but it is the art of conceiving things. It is no trick of style, but a character of thinking, and it marks the harvest-time of a manly culture.

"I will add to this enumeration one other quality, one without which this harvest will not ripen. I speak of mental docility and reverence. A man will have looked forth to little purpose on the universe if he does not see that, even with his expanding circle of light, there is an ever-enlarging circle of darkness around it. He will have compared his achievements with those of the race to little profit, if he does not recognize his relative insignificance, gathering sands on the ocean shore.

"The wide range and rapid outburst of modern learning tend undoubtedly to arrogance and conceit. We gleefully traverse our new strip of domain, and ask, Were there ever such beings as we? Yes, doubtless there were,—clearer, greater, and nobler. Wisdom, skill, and strength were not born with us. All the qualities of manly thought, though with ruder implements and cruder materials, have been as conspicuously exhibited down through the ages past as in our day. The power of governing, ability in war, diplomacy in peace, subtle dialectics, clear insight, the art of conversation, persuasive and impressive speech, high art in every form, whatever constitutes the test of good manhood, has been here in full force. It would puzzle us yet to lay the stones of Baalbec, or to carve, move, and set up the great statue of Rameses. Within a generation, Euclid of Alexandria was teaching geometry in Dartmouth College, and Heraclides and Aristarchus anticipated Copernicus by sixteen centuries. No man has surpassed the sculptures of Rhodes, or the paintings of the sixteenth century. The cathedral of Cologne is the offspring of forgotten brains. Such men as Anselm were educated on the Trivium and Quadrivium. Five hundred years ago Merton College could show such men as Geoffrey Chaucer, William of Occam, and John Wickliffe. If the history of science can produce four brighter contemporary names than Napier, Kepler, Descartes, and Galileo, let them be forthcoming. But when, still earlier by a century and a half, we behold a man who was not only architect, engineer, and sculptor, and in painting the rival of Angelo, but who, as Hallam proves, 'anticipated in the compass of a few pages the discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Maestlin, Maurolycus, and Castelli immortal,' it may well 'strike us,' he suggests 'with something like the awe of supernatural knowledge;' and in the presence of Leonardo da Vinci the modern scientist of highest rank may stand with uncovered head.

"If wisdom was not born with us, neither will it die with us. There will be something left to know. Our facts will be tested, our theories probed, and our assertions exploded by better minds than ours. If it be true, as Bacon says, 'prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiae,' it is also true, 'imprudens assertio excidium scientiae.' We are in these days treated to 'demonstrations' which scarcely rise to the level of presumptions, but, rather, of presumption. There is an accumulation of popular dogmatism that is very likely doomed within a century to be swept into the same oblivion with the 'Christian Astrology,' of William Lilly and the 'Ars Magna' of Raymond Lully—a mass of rubbish that is waiting for another Caliph Omar and the bath-fires of Alexandria.

"It will not answer to mistake the despotism of hypothesis for the reign of law, nor physical law for the great 'I AM.' True thinkers must respect other thinkers and God. They cannot ignore the primal utterances of consciousness, the laws of logic, nor the truths of history. Foregone conclusions are not to bar out the deepest facts of human nature, nor the most stupendous events in the story of the race. Hume may not rule out the settled laws of evidence the moment they touch the borders of religion; nor may Strauss, by the simple assertion that miracles are impossible, manacle the arm of God. Comte may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to the great imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is fully proved in detail. We have no disposition, even with so eminent an authority as St. George Mivart, to denominate Natural Selection 'a puerile hypothesis.' We will promise to pay our respects to our 'early progenitor' of 'arboreal habits' and 'ears pointed and capable of movement,' when he is honestly identified by his ear-marks, and even to worship the original fire-mist when that is properly shown to be our only Creator, Preserver, and Bountiful Benefactor.

"Meantime, as a late king of Naples was said to have erected the negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, the single source of power,' ourselves 'conscious automatons' in whom 'mind is the product of the brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a 'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank. But it was Mephistopheles who said,—

"'The little god of this world sticks to the same old way, And is as whimsical as on creation's day; Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him. He calls it Reason—thence his power's increased To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving thy gracious presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper seems to be, That springing flies and flying springs, And in the grass the same old ditty sings. Would he still lay among the grass he grows in.'

"But even the man of theories might grant that the scheme of one great, governing, guiding, loving, and holy God is a theory that works wonders in practice for those that heartily receive it, and is a conception of magnificence beside which even a Nebular Hypothesis with all its grandeur grows small. And the man of facts may as well recognize what Napoleon saw on St. Helena,—the one grand fact of the living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy battalions; a force that this hour beats in millions of hearts, all over this globe, with a living warmth beside which the love of science and art is cold and clammy. Surely it would be not much to ask for the docility to recognize such patent facts as these. And I must believe that any mind is fundamentally unhinged that despises the profoundest convictions of the noblest hearts, or speaks lightly of the mighty influence that has moulded human events and has upheaved the world. It has, in its arrogance, cut adrift and swung off from the two grand foci of all truth, the human and the divine.

"Of the several qualities,—the wakefulness, precision, fullness, equipoise, and docility—that form, in other words, the motion, edge, weight, balance, and direction of the forged and tempered intellect,—I might give many instances. Such men as Thomas Arnold and Mr. Gladstone instantly rise to the thoughts,—the one by his truth-seeking and truth-finding spirit moulding a generation of English scholars, the other carrying by the sheer force of his clear-cut intellect and magnanimous soul the sympathies of a great nation and the admiration of Christendom. But let me rather single out one name from the land of specialties and limitations,—Barthold George Niebuhr, the statesman and historian. Not perfect, indeed, but admirable. See him begin in his early youth by saying,—'I do not ask myself whether I can do a thing; I command myself to do it.' Read the singular sketch of his intellectual gymnastics at twenty-one, spurring himself to 'inward deep voluntary thought,' 'guarding against society and dissipation,' devoting an hour each day to clearing up his thoughts on given subjects, and two hours to the round of physical sciences; exacting of himself 'an extensive knowledge of the facts' of science and history; holding himself alike accountable for minute 'description,' 'accurate definitions,' 'general laws,' 'deep reflection,' and 'distinct consciousness of the rules of my moral being,' together with what he calls the holy resolve—'more and more to purify my soul, so that it may be ready at all times to return to the eternal source.' How intensely he toiled to counteract a certain conscious German one-sidedness of mind, visiting England to study all the varied phenomena of its robust life, and yet writing home from London, at twenty-two,—'I positively shrink from associating with the young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness.' His memory, not inferior to that of Macaulay or Scaliger, he made strictly the servant of his thinking. Amid all the speculative tendencies of Germany, he became a man of facts and affairs. Overflowing with details, he probed the facts of history to the quick, and felt for its heart. Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as 'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the verified quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to 'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness and colossal egoism of his later career. In the midst of public honors he valued more than all his delightful home and literary life, and his motto was Tecum habita. Surrounded by Pyrrhonism, and bent by the nature of his studies toward skeptical habits, how grandly he recovered himself in his maturity, and said,—'I do not know what to do with a metaphysical God, and I will have none but the God of the Bible, who is heart to heart with us.' 'My son shall believe in the letter of the Old and New Testaments, and I shall nurture in him from his infancy a firm faith in all that I have lost or feel uncertain about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,' contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true and manly culture.

"Shall I say that such a culture as I have endeavored to sketch, it is, and will be, the aim of Dartmouth College to stimulate? I cannot, at the close of this discourse, compare in detail its methods with the end in view, and show their fitness. The original and central college is surrounded by its several departments, partly or wholly professional, each having its own specialty and excellence. The central college seeks to give that rounded education commonly called Liberal, and to give it in its very best estate. It will aim to engraft on the stock that is approved by the collective wisdom of the past, all such scions of modern origin as mark a real progress. By variety of themes and methods it would stimulate the mental activity, and by the breadth of its range it would encourage fullness of material, both physical and metaphysical, scientific and historic. It initiates into the chief languages of Europe. By the close, protracted concentration of the mathematics, by the intuitions, careful distinctions, and fundamental investigations of intellectual and ethical science, and by the broad principles of political economy, constitutional and international law, as well as by a round of original discussions on themes of varied character, it aims to induce precision and mastery. And all along this line runs and mingles harmoniously and felicitously that great branch of study for which, though often severely assailed because unwisely defended or inadequately pursued, the revised and deliberate judgment of the ablest and wisest men can find no fair substitute,—the study of the classic tongues. Grant that it may be, and often is, mechanically or pedantically pursued. Yet, when rightly prosecuted, its benefits are wide, deep, and continuous, more than can be easily set forth—and they range through the whole scale, rising with the gradual expansion of the mind. It comprises subtle distinctions, close analysis, broad generalization, and that balancing of evidence which is the basis of all moral reasoning; it tracks the countless shadings of human thought, and their incarnation in the growths of speech, and seizes, in Comparative Philology, the universal affinities of the race: it passes in incessant review the stores of the mother tongue; it furnishes the constant clew to the meaning of the vernacular, a basis for the easy study of modern European languages, and a key to the terminology of science and art; it familiarizes intimately with many of the most remarkable monuments of genius and culture; and it imbues with the history, life, and thought which have prompted, shaped, and permeated all that is notable in the intellectual achievements of two thousand years, and binds together the whole republic of letters. To such a study as this we must do honor. We endeavor to add so much of the esthetic and ethical element throughout as shall give grace and worth. And we crown the whole with some teaching concerning the track of that amazing power that has overmastered all other powers, and stamped its impress on all modern history. The college was given to Christ in its infancy, and the message that comes down through a century to our ears, sounds not so much like the voice of a president as of an high-priest and prophet—the 'burden of Eleazar:' 'It is my purpose, by the grace of God, to leave nothing undone within my power which is suitable to be done, that this school of the prophets may be, and long continue to be, a pure fountain. And I do, with my whole heart, will this my purpose to my successors in the presidency of the seminary, to the latest posterity; and it is my last will, never to be revoked, and to God I commit it, and my only hope and confidence for the execution of it is in Him alone who has already done great things for it, and does still own it as his cause.' God has never yet revoked the 'last will' of Wheelock. The college is as confessedly a Christian college as in the days of her origin; and in the impending conflict she sails up between the batteries of the enemy with her flag nailed to the mast and her captain lashed to the rigging.

"The college stands to-day in its ideal and the intention of its managers, representative of the best possible training for a noble manhood. And I may venture to say, here and now, that if there be anything known to be yet lacking to the full attainment of that conception, if anything needs to be added to make this, in the fullest sense, the peer of the best college in the land, it will be the endeavor of the Trustees and the Faculty to add that thing.

"Dartmouth College is fortunate in many particulars. Fortunate in its situation, so picturesque and so quiet, fitted for faithful study, and full of healthful influences, physical and moral; fortunate in being the one ancient and honored as well as honoring college of this commonwealth; fortunate in enjoying the full sympathy of the people around and the entire confidence of the Christian community of the land; fortunate in the great class of young men who seek her instruction, with their mature characters, simple habits, manly aims, and resolute purposes; fortunate in a laborious Faculty, whose well-earned fame from time to time brings honorable and urgent calls to carry their light to other and wealthier seats of learning; fortunate in her magnificent roll of alumni, unsurpassed in its average of good manhood and excellent work, and bright with names of transcendent lustre. The genius of the place bespeaks our reverence and awe. For to the mind's eye this sequestered spot is peopled to overflowing with youthful forms that went forth to all the lands of the earth to do valiantly in the battle of life. Across this quiet green there comes moving again invisibly a majestic procession of the faithful and the strong, laden with labors and with honors. In these seats there can almost be seen to sit once more a hoary and venerable array of the great and good whose names are recorded on earth and whose home is in heaven. And over us there seems to hover to-day a great cloud of witnesses—spirits of the just made perfect. It is good to be here. I only pray that the new arm may not prove too weak to bear the banner in this great procession of the ages."



CHAPTER XX.

PROF. JOHN SMITH.—PROF. SYLVANUS RIPLEY.—PROF. BEZALEEL WOODWARD.

Having completed our survey of the work of the successive presidents, the deceased professors now claim our attention.

The following sketch of the life and labors of Prof. John Smith, is, in substance, from "Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit."

"John Smith, son of Joseph and Elisabeth (Palmer) Smith, was born at Newbury, (Byfield parish,) Mass., December 21, 1752. His mother was a descendant of the Sawyer family, which came from England to this country in 1643, and settled in Rowley, where she was born. The son was fitted for college at Dummer Academy, under the instruction of the well known 'Master Moody.' He early discovered an uncommon taste for the study of the languages, insomuch that his instructor predicted, while he was yet in his preparatory coarse, that he would attain to eminence in that department.

"He entered the Junior class in Dartmouth College, in 1771, at the time of the first Commencement in that institution. He went to Hanover in company with his preceptor and Governor Wentworth, and so new and unsettled was a portion of the country through which they passed, that they were obliged to encamp one night in the woods. Their arrival at Hanover excited great interest, and was celebrated by the roasting of an ox whole, at the Governor's expense, on a small cleared spot, near where the college now stands.

"He was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1773; and immediately after, was appointed preceptor of Moor's school at Hanover. This appointment he accepted; and, while discharging his duty as a teacher, was also engaged in the study of Theology under the direction of President Wheelock. In 1774 he was appointed tutor in the college, and continued in the office until 1778. About this time he received an invitation to settle in the ministry in West Hartford Conn., and, in the course of the same year, was elected professor of Languages in the college where he had been educated. His strong predilection for classical studies led him to accept the latter appointment; and until 1787 he joined to the duties of a professor those of a tutor, receiving for all his services one hundred pounds, lawful money, annually. His professorship he retained till the close of his life. He was college librarian for thirty years,—from 1779 to 1809. For two years he delivered lectures on Systematic Theology, in college, in connection with the public prayers on Saturday evening. He was a Trustee of the college from 1788 to the time of his death. He also officiated for many years as stated preacher in the village of Hanover. In 1803, the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon him by Brown University.

"Dr. Smith's abundant and unceasing labors as a professor, a minister, and an author, proved too much for his constitution, and are supposed to have hastened him out of life. He died in the exercise of a most serene and humble faith, on the 30th of April, 1809, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. His funeral sermon was preached by the Rev. Dr. Burroughs of Hanover.

"Dr. Smith was enthusiastically devoted to the study of languages through life. He prepared a Hebrew Grammar in his Junior year in college, which is dated May 14, 1772; and a revised preparation is dated February 11, 1774. About this time he also prepared a Chaldee Grammar. The original manuscript of these grammars, as also the greater part of his lectures on Theology, is deposited in the Library of the Northern Academy of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College. As early as 1779, he prepared a Latin Grammar, which was first published in 1802, and has gone through three editions. In 1803 he published a Hebrew Grammar; in 1804, an edition of "Cicero de Oratore," with notes, and a brief memoir of Cicero, in English; and in 1809, a Greek Grammar, which was issued about the time of his decease. He published also a Sermon at the dedication of the meeting house at Hanover, 1796, and a Sermon at the ordination of T. Eastman, 1801.

"Prof. Roswell Shurtleff, D.D., says of him: 'Dr. Smith was rather above the middling stature, straight, and well proportioned. His head was well formed, though blanched and bald somewhat in advance of his years. His face, too, as to its lineaments, was very regular and comely. His eyes were of a light-blue color, and tolerably clear.

"'As a linguist, he was minutely accurate, and faithful to his pupils, although I used to doubt whether he was familiar with the classic writers much beyond the field of his daily instructions. But in his day, philology, like many other sciences, was comparatively in its cradle, especially in this country. His reputation in his profession depended chiefly on the recitations; and there he was perfect to a proverb. The student never thought of appealing from his decision.

"'In his disposition he was very kind and obliging, and remarkably tender of the feelings of his pupils—a civility which was always duly returned.

"'In religious sentiment, he was unexceptionably orthodox, though fearful of Hopkinsianism, which made some noise in the country at that period. His voice was full and clear, and his articulation very distinct. His sermons were written out with great accuracy, but were perhaps deficient in pungency of application. On the whole, he could hardly be considered a popular preacher.

"'Professor Smith was a man of uncommon industry. This must be apparent from what he accomplished. Besides his two recitations daily, he supplied the college and village with preaching for about twenty years, and exchanged pulpits but very seldom; and, in the mean time, was almost constantly engaged in some literary enterprise. I well remember a conversation with the late President Brown, then a tutor in college, soon after the professor died,—in which we agreed in the opinion, that we had known no man of the same natural endowments, who had been more useful, or who had occupied his talent to better advantage.'"

We give the substance of some leading points of a notice of Professor Smith, in the "Memoirs of Wheelock."

"In 1809 the college experienced an immense loss, in the death of Dr. Smith. He had devoted his life chiefly to the study of languages. No other professor in any college of the continent, had so long sustained the office of instructor; none had been more happy, useful, or diligent. Though indefatigable in his studies, he was always social and pleasant with his friends, entirely free from that reserve and melancholy, not infrequent with men of letters. At an early age he obtained the honors of this seminary, and even while a young man was appointed professor of the Oriental Languages. These were the smallest moiety of his merit and his fame. Without that intuitive genius, which catches the relation of things at a glance, by diligence, by laborious study, by invincible perseverance, which set all difficulties at defiance, he rose in his professorship with unrivaled lustre. He, like a marble pillar, supported this seminary of learning. This fact is worth a thousand volumes of speculation, to prove the happy and noble fruits of well-directed diligence in study. But the best portrait of Dr. Smith is drawn by President Wheelock, in his eulogium on his friend, from which we make the following extract.

"'Early in life, so soon as his mind was susceptible of rational improvement, his father entered him at Dummer school, under the instruction of Mr. Samuel Moody. It is unnecessary to take notice of the development of his juvenile mind, his attention to literature, and especially his delight in the study of the ancient, Oriental Languages. That distinguished master contemplated the height, to which he would rise in this department; and his remark on him, when leaving the school to enter this institution, was equal to a volume of eulogy.

"'His mind was not wholly isolated in one particular branch. Philosophy, geography, criticism, and other parts of philology, held respectable rank in his acquirements; but these yielded to a prevailing bias: the investigations of language unceasingly continued his favorite object. The knowledge of the Hebrew with his propensity led him to the study of Theology. He filled the office of tutor in the college, when an invitation was made to him from Connecticut to settle in the ministry.

"'At this period, in the year 1778, the way was open to a professorship in the learned languages. On him the public eye was fixed. He undertook the duties, and entered the career of more splendid services in the republic of letters. His solicitude and labors were devoted to the institution, during its infantile state embarrassed by the Revolutionary war. He alleviated the burdens of the reverend founder of this establishment; and administered comfort and solace to him in his declining days.

"'From that period in 1779, Dr. Smith continued indefatigable in mental applications; faithful in the discharge of official duties; and active for the interest of the society, through scenes of trouble and adversity. The board of Trustees elected him a member of their body. The church at the college, founded by my predecessor, intrusted with him, as pastor, their spiritual concerns, and were prospered under his prudent and pious care. God blessed his labors; a golden harvest reminds us of the last. To the force of his various exertions, under Divine Providence, justice demands that we ascribe much in the rise and splendor of this establishment.

"'While surveying the circle of knowledge, and justly estimating the relative importance of its different branches, still his eye was more fixed on classical science; and his attachment seemed to concentrate the force of genius in developing the nature of language, and the principles of the learned tongues, on which the modern so much depend for their perfection. The Latin, the Greek, and the Hebrew, were almost as familiar to him as his native language. He clearly comprehended the Samaritan and Chaldaic; and far extended his researches in the Arabic.

"'The eminent attainments of Dr. Smith in the knowledge of the languages are attested by multitudes, scattered in the civilized world, who enjoyed his instruction. They will be attested, in future times, by his Latin Grammar, published about seven years ago; and by his Hebrew Grammar, which has since appeared. In each of these works, in a masterly manner, he treats of every matter proper for the student to know. Each subject is displayed, in a new method, with perspicuity, conciseness, simplicity, and classic taste. His Greek Grammar, we may suppose, will exhibit the same traits, when it shall meet the public eye. This last labor he had finished, and committed to the printer a few months before his decease.[39]

[39] It was afterward published and much approved.

"'If we turn to take a moral view of this distinguished votary of science, new motives will increase our esteem. What shall I say of the purity of his manners, his integrity and amiable virtues? These are too strongly impressed on the minds of all, who knew him, to need description. He was possessed of great modesty, and a degree of reserve, appearing at times to indicate diffidence, in the view of those less acquainted. But this, itself, was an effusion of his goodness, which led to yielding accomodation in matters of minor concern: yet, however, when the interest of virtue, or society, required him to act, he formed his own opinion, and proceeded with unshaken firmness. Those intimately acquainted with him can bear witness; and it is confirmed by invariable traits in his principles and practice, during life.

"'The virtues of Dr. Smith were not compressed within the circle of human relations, which vanish with time. Contemplating the first cause, the connections and dependencies in the moral state, his mind was filled with a sense of interminable duties. He was a disciple of Jesus. The former president admired and loved him, and taught him Theology. An amiable spirit actuated his whole life, and added peculiar splendor to the closing scene.

"'His intense pursuit of science affected his constitution, and produced debility, which, more than two years before, began to be observed by his friends. It gradually increased, but not greatly to interrupt his applications till six weeks before his death. While I revive the affliction at his departure, its accompanying circumstances will assuage our sorrow. The thoughts of his resignation to Divine Providence, through all the stages of a disease, that rapidly preyed upon his vitals, his composure, serenity, and Christian confidence, remain for the consolation of his friends, and instruction of all.

"'The fame of Dr. Smith does not arise from wealth, nor descent from titled ancestors. It has no borrowed lustre. He was indebted wholly to his genius, his labors, and his virtues. His monument will exist in the hearts of his acquaintance; and in the future respect of those, who shall derive advantage from his exertions.

"'In the immense loss, which his dear family sustain, they have saved a precious legacy; his example, and lessons of social and religious duties. The church, with mournful regret, will retain the tenderest affection for their venerable pastor. What shall I say of this seat of science, now covered with cypress? Those who have trod its hallowed walks, will never forget his instructions, nor the benevolent effusions of his heart. Where, in the ranges of cultivated society, is one to be found, qualified with those rare endowments, which can supply the chasm made by his death?'"

We insert in its appropriate place the contract made with Professor Smith by President Wheelock.[40]

[40] See Appendix.

His first wife was Mary, daughter of Rev. Ebenezer Cleaveland, of Gloucester, Mass., his second wife was Susan, daughter of David Mason, of Boston, Mass.

* * * * *

Prof. Sylvanus Ripley, who filled the chair of Divinity from 1782 to 1787, was the son of Jonathan Ripley, and was born at Halifax, Mass., September 29, 1749.

In introducing him to the favorable notice of Mr. Wheelock, previous to the commencement of his religious life, Rev. William Patten says: "Gracious exercises alone excepted, I know not a more promising young man."

Some extracts from President Wheelock's "Narratives," relating to Prof. Ripley's missionary labors, are worthy of attention.

"Mr. Sylvanus Ripley, who finished his course of collegiate studies here last fall, very cheerfully complied with the openings of Providence, to undertake a mission to the tribes in Canada, and accordingly prepared for that purpose, and set out with Lieut. Thomas Taylor, whom he had made choice of for his companion in that tour, as he had been long a captive with the French and Indians in those parts, and was well acquainted with the customs of both, and with their country, and could serve him as an interpreter. He sat out July 17, well recommended to the Lieut.-governor and Commander-in-chief, and others of that province, by his Excellency Governor Wentworth, and others. The special design of his journey was to see what door, or doors, was, or might be opened for him, or others, to go as missionaries among them, to open a way for intercourse between them and this school, and obtain a number of suitable youth, if it may be, to receive an education here; in the choice of which, he will have special respect to the children, whose parents were in former wars captivated by the Indians, and were naturalized, and married among them."

"September 26, 1772. A delay of sending the foregoing narrative to the press, gives an opportunity to oblige my friends with a short account of the success of Mr. Ripley's mission to Canada.

"He returned on the 21st instant, with his companion and interpreter, Lieut. Taylor, and brought with them ten youths, eight belonging to the tribe at Caughnawaga, near Montreal, and two of the tribe at Lorette, near Quebec. Soon after his arrival at the former of these places, he made known to them the errand on which he was sent, and disclosed the proposal of sending a number of their children to this school for an education; and left it to their consideration, till he should go and wait upon the Commander-in-chief of that province at Quebec. And after he had passed through the small-pox, which he took by inoculation, as it was judged unsafe for him to travel that country without it, he went to Quebec. But his Honor the Governor, as well as other English gentlemen, were apprehensive that the Indians were so bigoted to the Romish religion, that there was no hope of success, and advised him not to go on that errand to Lorette: he accordingly returned without visiting them as he proposed.

"But on his coming to Caughnawaga he found there two likely young men of the tribe at Loretto, who set out with a design to go to Sir William Johnson, with a single view to find a school in which they might get useful knowledge. They had heard nothing of Mr. Ripley, nor of any such design as he was upon in their favor, till they came to Caughnawaga, which is 180 miles on their way to Sir William's, and on hearing of the proposal Mr. Ripley had made, they waited five weeks at that place for his return, and on his coming complied with his offer of taking them into this school with cheerfulness. The same day a council of the chiefs of that tribe was called to consider of the proposal of sending their children to this school, which Mr. Ripley had left to their consideration, in which they were to a man agreed in the affirmative, and acknowledged with gratitude the benevolence and kindness of the offer. They continued united and firm to the last in that determination against the most warm and zealous remonstrances of their priest, both in public and private; in consequence of which determination, nine of their boys were made ready to accompany Mr. Ripley hither; three of which were children or descendants from captives, who had been captivated when they were young, and lived with them till they were naturalized and married among them."

A later "Narrative" says:

"The beginning of May [1773], the Rev. Mr. Ripley and Mr. Dean sat out on a mission to visit the Indians at Penobscott, and on the Bay of Fundy, as they should find encouragement, agreeable to representations heretofore made of a door open for service among them."

They had a good measure of success, in some respects, in this mission.

The following tribute to Professor Ripley is from the "Memoirs of Wheelock."

"In the winter of 1786-7, the college experienced the loss of an eminent instructor, the Rev. Sylvanus Ripley. He was suddenly called from his labors, in the vigor of life and the midst of extensive usefulness.

"After taking his degree in 1771, in the first class which received the honors of the college, he continued with Mr. Wheelock as a tutor in the college. In 1775, he was appointed master of Moor's Charity School, and in 1779, upon the decease of Dr. Wheelock, he succeeded him in the pastoral care of the church in the college, and soon after was elected professor of Divinity. Professor Ripley was a learned man, an orthodox divine, an evangelical and popular preacher. His eloquence had nothing artificial or studied. His sermons were seldom written; his manner was pleasing and winning, his words flowed as promptly and readily in the pulpit as in the social circle."

Professor Ripley died at Hanover, February 5, 1787, of injuries received in a fall from his carriage, while returning from a religious service in a distant part of the town.

His wife was Abigail, daughter of Pres. Eleazar Wheelock.

* * * * *

Bezaleel Woodward, the first professor of mathematics in the college, was the son of Israel and Mary (Sims) Woodward, and a descendant of Henry Woodward of Dorchester, Mass., 1638, and Northampton, Mass., 1639, where he was one of the "seven pillars" of the church formed there in 1661. He was born at Lebanon, Conn., July 16, 1745, and graduated at Yale College in 1764.

In 1767, Mr. Wheelock refers to him as an associate teacher, and "a dear youth, willing to do anything in his power" to aid him. The school is said to have been put on a college basis, in the matter of study, in 1768, with Mr. Woodward as tutor.

The following letter addressed to President Wheelock illustrates the versatile nature of his talents:

"Lebanon Sep^r 6^th 1770.

"Rev^d & hon^d Sir,

"Bingham arrived home well last week, and proposes to set out with two teams about the 18^th Ins^t. We have all of us been endeavouring to expedite the removal ever since he came home—but I fear Madam will not be able to set out so soon. She with Miss Nabby propose to ride in the Post Chaise as soon as they can possibly be ready. Hutchinson is to drive it for them. The Scholars will likely the most of them foot it when Bingham goes. Abraham & Daniel seem to resent it that they in particular should be sat to drive the Cows the Doctor mentioned in his to me & the English Scholars be excused from it. I have not procured Cows as yet—we have all been doing & shall do every thing in our power. Madam is so weak that a little croud overcomes her, that she has her poor turns very often; tho' on the whole I hope she is on the mending hand. I fear the fatigue of preparing & the journey will be too much for her—be sure unless she takes both very leisurely—but God is able to support her. By the tenor of the Doctor's Letters I apprehend he has forgot my proposed Journey to the eastward, which I would neglect, and with vigor pursue the grand object, the removal; for I see need enough that every one who is able to do any thing towards preparing should be doubly active now. I see eno' & more than eno' that is important and necessary to be done, & I never had a greater disposition to exert myself in getting things forward—but I have had such a croud of affairs on my mind, & still have, & must have so long as I continue here, that my health is so much impaired, my constitution become so brittle, & my nerves so weak, that I am rendered entirely unfit for application to any business at present; & therefore that I may be fit for some kind of business the ensuing winter I am advised and think it highly expedient & neccessary that I take my Journey soon (before I am rendered unable to do it)—and Providence seems to point out my duty to set out to-morrow, tho' it is with the greatest reluctance that I do it, on acco^t of the need of help here, but I am unfit to do anything to purpose if I stay. M^r MacCluer will do all in his power, tho' he is obliged (agreeable to the Doctor's directions) to attend Comencement next week to collect Subscriptions—he'll do all he can before he goes, & after he returns—what is done must be done in a hurry and confusion, & what cannot be done must remain undone. We have been examining the Scholars this week (& find they make a pretty good appearance) besides which we have done all we could that I might leave affairs in the best manner. My present proposal is to go to Boston & settle affairs—thence to Salem & visit dear Doctor Whitaker—thence perhaps to Portsmouth—then either return & accompany Madam & Family to Cohos (which I think of doing if I can get back in season)—or go directly from Portsmouth to Cohos—in either case I hope to be with the Doctor within a month. I want much—I long to see you. I want to do more, much more than I am able, to assist in removing—but the wise Governor of the Universe seems to forbid my doing much. I desire to commit the conduct of affairs to him. I shall endeavour as far as I am able to comply with all the D^r desires in his letters—shall carry the letter to M^r Whitefield to Boston myself. I shall write to M^r Keen a general Sketch of affairs. I hope to be able when I see the D^r & the Trustees meet to be able to determine what to do the ensuing winter. This Parish have M^r Potter to preach next Sabbath & expect M^r Austin after that. M^r Austin is now asleep in your house. I expect M^r Wheelock will be at home the last of next week or beginning of week after. Mary & Cloe I expect will ride up in the Carts. Porter, Judson & Collins are to set out next Monday (at their desire) that they may assist in making preparation. School must (I think) unavoidably break up till they remove. Scholars have been much engaged in study (especially in the Art of Speaking) since the Doctor went away. If Scholars are engaged Instructors must be so too—and if Instructors are diligent and faithful, Scholars will make improvement. We cannot learn that the duty on tea is taken off; and I expect difficulty in disposing of Bills; but shall do the best I can. I have tho'ts of carrying a Set to Boston. Is it not best to desire Miss Zurviah [Sprague] not to engage herself in business 'till the Doctor's mind can be known respecting her going to Cohos—I know not where one can be had to supply her place (omnibus consideratio)—will the D^r write his mind respecting it in his next? I have many things to say; but it is now between 1 & 2 o'Clock in y^e morning, and I find nature flags. I could get no other time to write. I have neither time nor strength to copy, therefore hope the D^r will excuse the scrawl from him who is with much duty & esteem Rev^d & hon^d Sir,