In a word, America seems to present all the possible characteristics of youth.  It is buoyant, confident, extravagant, ardent, elated, and proud.  It lives in the present.  The young men of twenty-one cannot believe in coming age; people do get to fifty, he believes; but, for himself, age is so far off that he need not consider it.  I observed the youthfulness of America even in New England, but the country as one got farther west seemed to become more youthful.  At Chicago, I suppose, no one owns to more than five-and-twenty—­youth is infectious.  I felt myself while in the city much under that age.

Let us pass to another point—­also an essential—­the flaunting of the flag, I had the honour of assisting at the ‘Sollemnia Academica,’ the commencement of Harvard on the 28th of June last.  I believe that Harvard is the richest, as it is also the oldest, of American universities; it is also the largest in point of numbers.  The function was celebrated in the college theatre; it was attended by the governor of the State with the lieutenant-governor and his aide-de-camp; there was a notable gathering on the stage or platform, consisting of the president, professors and governors of the university, together with those men of distinction whom the university proposed to honour with a degree.  The floor, or pit, of the house was filled with the commencing bachelors; the gallery was crowded with spectators, chiefly ladies.  After the ceremony we were invited to assist at the dinner given by the students to the president, and a company among whom it was a distinction for a stranger to sit.  The ceremony of conferring degrees was interesting to an Englishman and a member of the older Cambridge, because it contained certain points of detail which had certainly been brought over by Harvard himself, the founder, from the old to the new Cambridge.  The dinner, or luncheon, was interesting for the speeches, for which it was the occasion and the excuse.  The president, for his part, reported the addition of $750,000 to the wealth of the college, and called attention to the very remarkable feature of modern American liberality in the lavish gifts and endowments going on all over the States to colleges and places of learning.  He said that it was unprecedented in history.  With submissions to the learned president, not quite without precedent.  The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a similar spirit in the foundation and endowment of colleges and schools in England and Scotland.  About half the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and three out of the four Scottish universities, belong to the period.  Still, it is very remarkable to find this new largeness of mind.  Since one has received great fortune, let this wealth be passed on, not to make a son into an idle man, but to endow, with the best gifts of learning and science, generation after generation of men born for work.  We, who are ourselves so richly endowed, and have been so richly endowed for four