So many sighs load this sweet inland air,
’T is hard to breathe, nor can we find relief;
However lightly touched, we all must share
The nobleness of grief.

But sighs are spent before they reach your ear,
Vaguely they mingle with the water’s rune;
No sadder sound salutes you than the clear,
Wild laughter of the loon.

* * * * *

SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY.

It happened to me once to “assist” at the celebration of Class-Day at Harvard University.  Class-Day is the peculiar institution of the Senior Class, and marks its completion of college study and release from college rules.  It is also an institution peculiar, I believe, to Harvard, and I was somewhat curious to observe its ceremonials, besides feeling a not entirely unawful interest in being introduced for the first time to the arcana of that renowned Alma Mater.

She has set up her Lares and Penates in a fine old grove, or a fine old grove and green have sprouted up around her, as the case may be.  At all events, there is sufficient groundwork for any quantity of euphuism about “classic shades,” “groves of Academe,” et cetera.  Trollope had his fling at the square brick buildings; but it was a fling that they richly deserved, for they are in very deed as ugly as it is possible to conceive,—­angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky,—­and the farther in you go, the worse it grows.  Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, is it necessary for boys’ schools to be placed without the pale of civilization?  Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity?  When I entered those brick boxes, I felt as if I were going into a stable.  Wood-work dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy and dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything unhomelike, unattractive, narrow, and rickety.  Think, now, of taking a boy away from his home, from his mother and sisters, from carpets and curtains and all the softening influences of cultivated taste, and turning him loose with dozens of other boys into a congeries of pens like this!  Who wonders that he comes out a boor?  I felt a sinking at the heart in climbing up those narrow, uncouth staircases.  We talk about education.  We boast of having the finest system in the world.  Harvard is, if not the most distinguished, certainly among the first institutions in the country; but, in my opinion, formed in the entry of the first Harvard house I entered, Harvard has not begun to hit the nail on the head.  Education!  Do you call it education, to put a boy into a hole, and work out of him a certain amount of mathematics, and work into him a certain number of languages?  Is a man dressed, because one arm has a spotless wristband, unquestionable sleeve-buttons, a handsome sleeve, and a well-fitting