Having now spent some time in four of the leading German universities, and contemplating a longer stay for the purpose of visiting others, the writer has thought that some general remarks might call attention to points often disregarded, and serve to give some insight into the nature of the institutions of learning of the country,—­rather aiming to characterize the system of higher education as it now exists than to give detailed historical notices, including something of student-life, and the professors,—­in fine, such observations as would not be likely to be made by a general tourist, and such as native writers deem it unnecessary to make, presupposing a knowledge of the facts in their own readers.

The German universities are the culminating point of German culture.  They concentrate within themselves the intellectual pith of the country.  Dating their foundation as far back as the fourteenth century, as Prague, Vienna, and Heidelberg,—­or established but of late years in the nineteenth, as Berlin, Bonn, and Munich,—­they attract to themselves the mental strength of the land, forming a focus from which radiates, whether in Theology, Science, Literature, or Art, the new world of thought, which finds its way to remotest regions, often filtered and unacknowledged.  They number among their professors the most distinguished men of the century, whether poets, philosophers, or divines.  All who lay claim to authorship find in the lecture-room a firm stand and rank in society, as Government is ever ready to insure a life-position to distinguished scholars.  To mention only a few examples of men who would scarcely be thought of in a professorial career,—­Schiller was Professor of History in Jena, Rueckert Professor in Berlin, Uhland in Tuebingen.

In nothing can Germany manifest a better-grounded feeling of national pride than in this, its university system.  Politically inert, divided into petty states, powerless, the ever-ready prey of more active or ambitious neighbors, it has played a pitiful role in the world’s history, with annals made up of petty feuds and jealousies and tyrannical meannesses, never working as one people, save when driven to extremity.  With countless differences of dialect, manners, customs, it is one and national in nothing save in its literature, and feels that, through the high culture of its scholars, through the new paths its men of science have opened, through the profound investigations of the learned in every sphere, it holds its place at the head of every intellectual movement of the age.  It feels that its universities are the laboratories whence issue the thoughts whose significance the world is ever more and more ready to acknowledge.  France even, selfish and proud of its past supremacy in all things, has within the last quarter of a century laid aside much of its exclusiveness, and a Germanic infusion is perceptible through all the mannerism of the latest and best productions of the French school.  Comparatively of late years is it, that the English mind has fairly come in contact with this German culture.  Its first loud manifestation may be heard in the prose of Carlyle and his school; yet even now its influence has permeated our whole literature so much, that, when reading some of our latest poetry, tones and melodies will come like distant echoes from the groves on the hillsides where warble the nightingales of Germany.