4. Transcendentalism in New England.  By O. B. Frothingham.  New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1875.

[1]The Indian name of Concord River.

CHAPTER V.

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS.

1837-1861.

With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it is have been college graduates.  And yet our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, literary centers.  Most of them have been small and poor, and situated in little towns or provincial cities.  Their alumni scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship or letters find little to attract them at the home of their alma mater, and seek by preference the larger cities, where periodicals and publishing houses offer some hope of support in a literary career.  Even in the older and better equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of working scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather inclined to undervalue merely “literary” performance.  In many cases the fastidious and hypercritical turn of mind which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism which naturally characterizes an ancient seat of learning, and the spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free discussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the originality and creative impulse of their inmates.  Hence it happens that, while the contributions of American college teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and philology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and the severer branches of learning have been honorable and important, they have as a class made little mark upon the general literature of the country.  The professors of literature in our colleges are usually persons who have made no additions to literature, and the professors of rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to write for the reason that they themselves have never written any thing that any one has ever read.

To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers some striking exceptions.  It was not the large and fashionable university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics, with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very homogeneous clientele, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of eastern Massachusetts.  Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other American university town.  The neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing