not now command the acceptance that once belonged to it, and that part of it which has been most influential may be put to-day to a use of which he did not dream, and of which he would not have approved, but Hamilton himself—­“the black eagle of the desert,” as the “Chaldee Manuscript” calls him—­was a mighty force.  The influence of that vehement and commanding personality on a generation of susceptible young men was deep and far-reaching.  He seized and held the minds of his students until they were able to grasp what he had to give them,—­until, in spite of the toil and pain it cost them, they were made to grasp it.  And he further trained them in habits of mental discipline and intellectual integrity, which were of quite priceless value to them.  “I am more indebted to you,” wrote Cairns to him in 1848, “for the foundation of my intellectual habits and tastes than to any other person, and shall bear, by the will of the Almighty, the impress of your hand through any future stage of existence.”

[Footnote 1:  Memoir of Sir W. Hamilton, p. 231.]

Cairns was first in Hamilton’s class at the close of the session, and also first in Professor John Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class.  “Of the many hundreds of students,” Wilson wrote four years later, “whose career I have watched during the last twenty years, not one has given higher promise of excellence than John Cairns; his talents are of the highest order; his attainments in literature, philosophy, and science rare indeed; and his character such as to command universal respect.”

This winter he joined with eight or nine of Hamilton’s most distinguished students in forming the “Metaphysical Society,” which met weekly for the purpose of discussing philosophical questions.  In a Memoir which he afterwards wrote of John Clark, one of the founders of this Society, he thus describes the association that led to its being formed, and that was further cemented by its formation:  “Willingly do I recall and linger upon these days and months, extending even to years, in which common studies of this abstract nature bound us together.  It was the romance—­the poetry—­of speculation and friendship.  All the vexed questions of the schools were attempted by our united strength, after our higher guide had set the example.  The thorny wilds of logic were pleasant as an enchanted ground; its driest technicalities treasured up as unspeakably rare and precious.  We stumbled on, making discoveries at every step, and had all things common.  Each lesson in mental philosophy opened up some mystery of our immortal nature, and seemed to bring us nearer the horizon of absolute truth, which again receded as we advanced, and left us, like children pursuing the rainbow, to resume the chase.  In truth, we had much of the character of childhood in these pursuits—­light-heartedness, wonder, boundless hope, engrossment with the present, carelessness of the future.  Our old world daily became new; and the real world of the multitude to