HARVARD COLLEGE.

[Two Seniors meet in the path that runs through the old graveyard.]

1ST SENIOR. I should think you mad, if madness were a possible result of four annuals in French, German, Natural History, and the History of Music. What on earth are you staring at that piece of dirty paper for?

2D SENIOR. I found it lying here. I've made out four lines of the writing on it: they are in verse. I'll warrant they are more of a puzzle than you can solve.

1ST S. Let's sit down and decipher the old scrap, a la Champollion. Here's a convenient tomb for a sofa. Great gad! think of sitting on a man who had won

"MAXIMAM PIETATIS, ERUDITIONIS, FACUNDIAE LAUDEM!"

Here's another, - died five years before the Venetians blew up the Parthenon. (Reading.)

"AEQUANIMITATE VIX AEQUIPARANDA PRAEDITI,

PIETATE, PROBITATE, ERUDITIONE CONSPICUI."

The good man had as many virtues as the windows in the Memorial Hall.

2D S. Come, read this.

1ST S. Well, give it to me.

(Reading.)

O thou whose mouth with artless ease

Frames speech which seems alike to please

The ears (Dear me, how very odd!)

Of Freshmen and Almighty God!

O thou who oft hast aptly said

That doves are not from eagles bred,

That great men always have great sons,

Predestined for Fame's benisons!

O thou who, by thy winsome tricks,

Art first in Freshmen firm to fix

A clear idea of what must be

That mystic, unknown Faculty!

The thing breaks off; at least the rest of it is illegible. Evidently four or five verses were written on the other side of the sheet.

2D S. But what does it all mean? The first verse plainly refers to an equal facility in the performance of duties professional and ecclesiastical, and the last implies that the "thou" referred to was the first visible embodiment of a type which had previously been dimly comprehended. It must be a satire on some Yale instructor. No doubt some Yale man wrote it and lost it on his visit here with the Nine. It's written in blue ink, - of course a Yale man wrote it.

1ST S. Of course a Yale man wrote it. And yet the sentences are all grammatical; the second verse, too, has a classical touch, - a reference to one of Horace's odes.

2D S. You see nothing in it, I suppose.

1ST S. Yes, a certain cleverness.

2D S. There's something else in what it intimates. I confess I am not yet able to be reconciled to the separation of great wisdom from great character. The former, if present without the latter, can lay no claim to merit. If men forget that we have had four centuries of printing, and so seek to make encyclopaedias of themselves, they must pay the penalty of their forgetfulness, for the days of the admiration of walking dictionaries are past. It is this absence of character which these verses intimate, and an absence of the respect which character would have inspired, but without which wisdom is belittled and its aspect made deplorable.

1ST S. I agree with you. But is this separation which you have mentioned altogether absent from us? It was a bold step, this elective system; and bolder, voluntary recitations. It means that, in power of judgment, men of twenty stand on a level with their instructors. Parental authority is relinquished, and in place of the imposed self-discipline which the rigor of Puritan teachers imposed on the taught, what have we? There is only one substitute possible, - the personal influence of individual character, - and this is wanting. Do not answer by citing this instructor or that, - I rejoice equally with you in the discovery. But take each class, take each department, and try to point them out to me. No college in the country has conditions so favorable to the strong influence of an instructor's character, provided it exert itself at all, as Harvard. No longer can a professor make himself felt here by utterances ex cathedra; for, unless he has a "corner" on the subject, his elective may be abandoned. But for this very reason, his influence, wherever it is felt, will enter the more deeply; for there is no compulsion in the reception of it. And yet, I ask, is there evidence of a general influence of this kind supplanting the former parental authority? Are there no signs of the laxity of unrestraint, with no stronger guide than the undeveloped character which youth itself supplies unaided?

2D S. What if there are? Would any men act differently with such opportunities for ease before them?

1ST S. I'm sure you are no coward, and I would not have you become one by putting in the plea of human frailty. What men are it is our duty to consider only as the starting-point to what men may be. To justify our acts by other men's is to set up an external standard which, in politics for instance, would induce corruption to grow stronger and in thirty years destroy this nation. We've had enough servility. No emancipation proclamation was ever more urgently needed than that which shall release the countless slaves of public opinion, and put a stop to such theatrical performances as that of Mr. Blaine in offering his pulse to be felt, that the country might know he was not nervous! In college the demand is equally imperative. Men's manners here are an imitation; given any unusual set of circumstances, not covered by conventional rules, and dozens of men who call themselves polite behave like barbarians. Their religious belief is a mere acceptance of family traditions; why they hold it is as mysterious as is to the Freshman the query, "Why am I in college?" Their knowledge, too, they hold as some talisman to be used, apparently, in imposing upon others, but nevertheless as something so entirely separate from their own characters that the very mention of it is ground for the accusation of "talking shop."

You cannot deny this externality of living. The talk and the writings of the College show it. Witness the imbecilities of men brought up apparently on moral pap. Their gentle nature shudders at the thought of the disgrace of being watched by proctors, and yet does not hesitate to allow this watchfulness to justify them in a deception and a lie. The poor creatures know no better, for they have no sovereign standard of conduct within themselves. But imagine the discomfort the tender souls will meet with in the world, where the existence of policemen and penitentiaries will be a constant imputation on their virtue; and they will become miserable if indeed they do not become, as when under proctors, liars. But you know, as well as I, the shallowness of their morality, which would justify dishonorable action on the ground of its expediency, and in the face of a condition or the loss of a degree would make cribbing a virtue endowed with saving grace. Just as though such losses were not the inevitable result of previous, long-continued neglect of duty; and they would be borne as such by men who were not so childish as to need a master, and who were brave enough to recognize their own responsibility for their acts and to abide by the consequences. Well, make believe they are men, and give them voluntary recitations; but be assured, so long as Freshmen are under men whose own characters are yet so undeveloped as to give them no time to think of influencing the development of others, - be assured that we shall have many incongruities in our College life and government, and perhaps, in time, writers of such verses as we suppose the Yale man left behind him. Come, let's go to Jarvis.

A. A. W.