“Midnight oil,” so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene.  Where hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred.  Kirk White, while at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten o’clock that night instead of three o’clock the next morning, he would have been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all collegians.  Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the religion bilious.  We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong stomach.  Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric juices.  Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.

But, after all, there was something wrong about those summer boat-races.  A student with a stout arm, and great girth, and full chest, and nothing else, is not at all admirable.  Mind and body need to be driven tandem, the body for the wheel horse and the intellect the leader.  We want what is now proposed in some directions—­a grand collegiate literary race.  Let the mental contest be on the same week with the muscular.  Let Yale and Harvard and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among scholars.  Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and mathematics and philosophy.  Let us see whether the students of Doctors McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt.  About twelve o’clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow, oar-lock and oar-lock.  Let Helicon empty its waters to swell the river of knowledge on which they row.  Right foot on right rib of the boat, and left foot on the left rib—­bend into it, my hearties, bend!—­and our craft come out four lengths ahead.

Give the brain a chance as well as the arm.  Do not let the animal eat up the soul.  Let the body be the well-fashioned hulk, and the mind the white sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on toward the harbor of glorious achievement.  When that boat starts, we want to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with sky-rockets.

“By the way,” I said, “Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a cheering tendency?  Governor, do you ever have the blues?”

The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his spectacles up on his forehead, replied: 

Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as “the blues.”  There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects.  The immediate cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or pickled oysters at twelve o’clock the night before.