literary celebrities, is striking. We have been at the pains to run carefully over the catalogues of both from the year eighteen hundred down. We should say that Harvard outnumbers Yale, at least three to one, in names of eminent literary men. There must be reasons for this. One reason, perhaps, is found in the fact (it is a fact, we believe) that Yale drew its patronage, for many years, in greater proportion from the South; while Harvard recruited its classes more from New England, and especially from Massachusetts. Scholarship and literature were never the leading ambition of the ingenuous South; and, besides, New England, and by eminence Massachusetts, boys enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a far better preparatory training.

Another reason, however, we are compelled to believe, must lie in the different manner in which Yale and Harvard have manned their department of belleslettres instruction. Second-rate abilities and secondrate culture cannot occupy the chair of rhetoric for a long series of years, at a seat of high education, without registering an appropriate effect in the intellectual character and development of the students. On the other hand, genius and accomplishments, like those of a Ticknor, a Longfellow, a Lowell (the illustrious triumvirate of recent succession in the chair of elegant literature at Harvard), cannot preside over the literary studies of a series of classes without impressing a corresponding character upon their intellectual development. It is a capital mistake for boards of college oversight to suppose that they have done the best for the literary education of young men, when they have provided them with an instructor who is willing to go through unlimited drudgery, in the way of minute rudimentary criticism of their essays with the pencil or the pen. Infinitely better, in our judgment, it would be for col

lege classes, if their rhetorical teacher should even, save in exceptional cases, never once see the essays of their pupils. This is no place for discussing a point of education, and we cannot pause to vindicate our opinion. We scarcely state it, indeed. We baldly suggest it. Stimulus, more than criticism, is what the forming literary mind requires. Vigorous growth can better be trusted than the most laborious pruning-knife, to give symmetry of form. Besides, only vigorous growth responds to the pruning-knife with desirable results. The criticism that is applied should be living criticism -by which we mean oral criticism, in which the criticised writer himself should share as respondent, while the writer's classmates, under stimulating and regulating direction from the head of the department, should take a principal part in it. It is in some such way that the voluntary societies of a college manipulate their members; and many a student will testify that he is more indebted to their influence than to the influence of the regular instruction for the forming of his literary habits. This colluctant play of mental faculties in generous social exercise, is worth, for literary discipline, all the dead pen-strokes that could be strewn on a manuscript essay by the most industrious grammarian in the world. A teacher who can do, has done, is doing literary work of acknowledged value himself, provided always that it be with art, and not wholly by instinct, is the man to teach literary workmanship to college students. Such a man will not be a drudge. And such a man need not be. An ounce of stimulus here outweighs a ton of drill.

But while we thus attribute a deserved preeminence to Harvard University, for its share in the nurture of those minds which have hitherto represented American letters, a just deduction from its praise remains to be

made. The circle of culture which centres at Harvard has done little in the way of such production as is fitted both to endure itself and to produce its like again. Its work has been mainly epideictic work. Its history is likely to turn out more valuable as writing than as history. Its eloquence tends to be rhetoric rather than eloquence. Its poetry seems to be the echo of singing rather than song. As for its theology, that is the empty shell of negation, out of which the positive kernel of gospel has gone. Reverence, as a matter of religion, has mostly disappeared; the decorous affectation of it that remains is a matter of æsthetics. Self-complacency is the broadest trait that characterizes this school of culture. It is a very well-bred self-complacency, and it rallies itself with admirable pleasantry. But it is an evident token of shallowness. The end is easy to predict. The literary sceptre will surely depart from Boston. Puritanism gave the Boston mind a great launch. But the force of that launch will not last forever. New Boston will have to borrow vigor from an earnestness rooted in religion deeper than æsthetics, or the days of its literary dominion are numbered.

“An age too late" is, perhaps, Mr. Lowell's misfortune. The bracing moral atmosphere that blew down on an earlier generation, from the heroic heights of a more religious time, would have suited better with something in the man that allies him to an order of greatness, toward which the current Boston aspiration is no longer hospitable. Dr. Holmes is the perfectlycontented child of present Boston-furnished with a complete assortment of easy solutions for the problems that perplex nobler minds, and quite incapable of their unworldly sorrow. But when Mr. Lowell speaks in the dialect of this shallow complacency, he always seems, somehow, to be using a language that is not his

mother-tongue. He is haunted by doubts, and fears, and guesses, that are not dreamed of in the popular Boston philosophy. Puritanism would very likely have oppressed Dr. Holmes, and quite silenced his chirrup. But Puritanism might almost have made Mr. Lowell a lesser Milton. It is creditable to Mr. Lowell that his moral and his intellectual sympathies are in the noblest sense conservative. That heady radicalism in religion and in politics, which Boston calls progress, has long ago, we believe, left Mr. Lowell in the rear. His present aspect, if we do not mistake, is rather toward a past prematurely forsaken, than toward a future plucked at by rash hands before its season due." Whatever mutations impend in literary judgment, Mr. Lowell, if one may venture without offence to anticipate the criticism of the future, will always be remembered as one of the greatest and best of that school of brilliant wits who contented themselves with making a transient eddy in the main current of intellectual human activity, the direction of which they might, perhaps, have influenced, and the volume of which they might have contributed, in some degree, to swell.

66

MR. LOWELL'S "CATHEDRAL."

WE

E judge from the delicate deprecation which seems to be conveyed in the dedicatory note to this little volume that Mr. Lowell's publisher constituted a kind of Amphictyonic Council in the case. But the compelling and, so, excusing decree does not appear to have extended further than to the material form which the work should assume. We may, therefore, gently proceed to bring the poem itself to the critical rack without impiety notwithstanding.

The publisher has done what a publisher could (and Mr. Fields has laid his vocation under debt by enlarging the bounds of publishing possibility) to conciliate a favorable judgment at sight. Besides the various enterprising expedients of public prepossession which he has employed with admirable address in the present behalf, the appearance of the volume is as dainty as sumptuous paper, fair type, liberal spaces, and tasteful binding can make it. The first choice of title is said to have been "A Day at Chartres." The change from this was made perhaps in part the better to justify the engravings prefixed of the cathedral doors and the cathedral interior, which add an obvious charm of art to the more recluse charm of the poetry. The engravings may be pronounced appropriate enough and beautiful enough to justify in turn the change in the title. The original title, however, "A Day at Chartres,' would have been a better term of comprehension for the somewhat heterogeneous matter contained in the