Before the Weender Gate I met two small native schoolboys, one of whom was saying to the other, “I don’t intend to keep company any more with Theodore; he is a low blackguard, for yesterday he didn’t even know the genitive of Mensa.”  Insignificant as these words may appear, I still regard them as entitled to be recorded—­nay, I would even write them as town-motto on the gate of Goettingen, for the young birds pipe as the old ones sing, and the expression accurately indicates the narrow, petty academic pride so characteristic of the “highly learned” Georgia Augusta.[51] The fresh morning air blew over the highroad, the birds sang cheerily, and, little by little, with the breeze and the birds, my mind also became fresh and cheerful.  Such refreshment was sorely needed by one who had long been confined in the Pandect stable.  Roman casuists had covered my soul with gray cobwebs; my heart was as though jammed between the iron paragraphs of selfish systems of jurisprudence; there was an endless ringing in my ears of such sounds as “Tribonian, Justinian, Hermogenian, and Blockheadian,” and a sentimental brace of lovers seated under a tree appeared to me like an edition of the Corpus Juris with closed clasps.  The road began to take on a more lively appearance.  Milkmaids occasionally passed, as did also donkey-drivers with their gray pupils.  Beyond Weende I met the “Shepherd” and “Doris.”  This is not the idyllic pair sung by Gessner, but the duly and comfortably appointed university beadles, whose duty it is to keep watch and ward so that no students fight duels in Bovden, and, above all, that no new ideas (such as are generally obliged to remain in quarantine for several decades outside of Goettingen) are smuggled in by speculative private lecturers.  Shepherd greeted me as one does a colleague, for he, too, is an author, who has frequently mentioned my name in his semi-annual writings.  In addition to this, I may mention that when, as was frequently the case, he came to cite me before the university court and found me “not at home,” he was always kind enough to write the citation with chalk upon my chamber door.  Occasionally a one-horse vehicle rolled along, well packed with students, who were leaving for the vacation or forever.

In such a university town there is an endless coming and going.  Every three years beholds a new student-generation, forming an incessant human tide, where one semester-wave succeeds another, and only the old professors stand fast in the midst of this perpetual-motion flood, immovable as the pyramids of Egypt.  Only in these university pyramids no treasures of wisdom are buried.