New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1867-07-01
TILE COMMENCEMENT SEASON.

out the country, remind us that we nave once
more arrived at tho season of the annual
academic swarming. For many hundreds OF
young men the first period of professional
education, the period of those great chances
which comparative seclusiOn affords, is over,
and the time has come for manlier and more
practical studies, pursued under discipline
somewhat relaxed, and with greater demand
upon self guidance and self-gOvemment. The
Young Bachelor of Arts, although still
boy in the eyes of an older and sadder
wisdom, is generally in such an exalted
condition of premature manliness that advice,
however kindly, is thrown away upon him.
He cannot conceive how it is that men who
are men know less and less as they grow older
and older; and even if he has taken the first
steps in an honest intellectual training, he
would listen with incredulity if told that he Is
still almost as ignorant as q child, and has be-
fore him the difficult task of forgetting many
things that are behind. That graduate is for
tunate who, in addition to the Latin and
Greek which he will now neglect, and the
mathematics which may be OF no prac-
teal use to him, has caught glimpse.
however faint, of the real nature of mental
culture, and has thus armed himself against
conceit and dangerous if not fatal compla-
ceney. These things have doubtless been said
better than we can say them, and have fallen
too often upon the unbelieving ears of the
strong, the sanguine, and the hopeful. No very
young man can be expected to appreciate the
truth and wisdom Of the Baccalaureate
sermons. Alas the congregation COM
monty knows more than the preacher.
We confess that our sympathies are mainly'
with those who are just now matriculatlng.
We cannot tell them how infinitely precious
seems to us these four years which are before
them of golden opportunities which come to
man only once in his lifetime. They cannot
know how we who have long struggled with the
accident of existence, and have the dust of the
conflict always upon our garments look back
to the little room, the leisure, the freedom from
petty cares and distracting anxieties, the library
with its afluence of books the still atmosphere OF
erudition, and the constant society of educated
men, Four years dedicated TO thought, to read
ing, to study, with every help which older
wisdom and kindness can suggest! Four years
too often wasted in foolish amusements, and
worse than foolish designations, physical or in
tellectual, in habitual Incidence and careless
neglect!
Those Freshmen who are just from the study
of Cicero's oratons will remember an admir-
able remark, which, though it would be against
our rule, we are almost half tempted to quote in
the original "If' he says, eve seek only pleasure
"in liberal studies, what remission of the mind
could be pleasanter or noblerp The oma-
ment Of youth, the solace Of busy life, the con-
ISOLATION of age happy is he who can secure in
intellectual culture both the decus and tutdmeR
which the grateful Horace found in mis- patron
Mgcenas 1t is hardly necessary for us to
say that the four years of the under
graduate course are those in which the tastes
are usually formed the habit of study con-
firmed or altogether abandoned, the elementary
knowledge acquired, without which future pro-
gress if not impossible is at least improbable.
We remember charming passage in a letter
of Sir Walter Scott, in which he asserts that
at every period of his brilliant career he re-
GREETED the lack of a sound literary foundation,
and laments that he has been forced constantly
to feel his deficiencies True ability is always
modest, and many of us might think
ourselves exceedingly fortunate if we pos
sessed 1.-THE of the erudition which
Scott thought so Insignificant. A college course
is or should be no more than the laying in OF
provisions for long and stormy voyage.
Without, of course, meaning that the prescribed
curriculum should be neglected, we think that
every undergraduate should carry on par
allel course of his own selection and arrange
ment. 1t will be none the less useful to him
because in the beginning he will make many
mistakes and be obliged often to retrace his
footsteps. A habit mode; ated, we mean, by
becoming modesty, of selecting for himself the
best books upon topics in which he is specially
interested, will result in information at once
multifarious and accurate. In most colleges,
for instance, the study of history, the Only
purely literary study of much practical
value, is strangely neglected. Indeed, at
this moment we remember only one Ameri-
can Professor of History who has made
an important contribution to this branch
of letters. We have no Niebuhrs, no
Neanders, no DR.. Arnolds, and no Goodwin
Smiths. Yet the very first condition of doing
anything well in this world is to know what
has already been done well or ill, to under
stand not only human mistakes, but how they
came to be made, and to extract from all the tur-
mol of the ages half-a-dozen truths which may
help to solve the problems Of the present
Then, again, if one is seeking merely enter
tainment, it is manlier to find it in the pages
of Xenophon OF Livy, of Gibbon or Hume, of
Prescott or Hildreth, or Palfrey, than to rely
for stimulus and recreation upon the thousand
romances of this novel-teeming age. Probably
there are not more than twenty works of prose
fiction in all languages which are worth read
ing for their own sake, and perhaps even this
estimate is exaggerated The man who reads
and really loves these will not care for the
I'm i'll rbo l.