Emerson’s wisdom of sixty years ago.  The American cities are beginning to build handsome houses for their High Schools.  Columbia University builds a noble temple for its library.  The graduates and friends of Harvard like to provide her with a handsome fence round the Yard, with a fair array of shrubs within the fence, with a handsome stadium instead of shabby, wooden seats round the football gridiron, and to take steps for securing in the future broad connections between the grounds of the University and the Cambridge parks by the river.  They are just now carrying into practice Emerson’s teaching; by the advantage of a palace they mean to better Harvard’s instruction in manners.  They are accepting his doctrine that “manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that for the most part his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners.  When we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons, and inspiring tokens of character they convey, and what divination is required in us for the reading of this fine telegraph,—­we see what range the subject has, and what relations to convenience, power, and beauty.”

In Emerson’s early days there was nothing in our schools and colleges which at all corresponded to what we now know too much about under the name of athletic sports.  The elaborate organization of these sports is a development of the last thirty years in our schools and colleges; but I find in Emerson the true reason for the athletic cult, given a generation before it existed among us.  Your boy “hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats.  Well, the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training....  Football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn....  Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret free-masonries.”  We shall never find a completer justification of athletic sports than that.

In his memorable address on The American Scholar, which was given at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out that the function of the scholar should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days, research, or the search for new truth.  He says:  “The soul active ... utters truth, or creates....  In its essence it is progressive.  The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius....  They look backward and not forward.  But genius looks forward.  Man hopes:  genius creates.  Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;—­cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.”  And more explicitly still, he says:  “Colleges have their indispensable office,—­to teach elements.  But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create.”  When Emerson wrote this passage, the spirit of research, or discovery, or creation had not yet breathed life into the higher institutions of learning in our country; and to-day they have much to do and to acquire before they will conform to Emerson’s ideal.