Most superb of all, always there hangs at night, above the buildings and the tree-tops, a glorious full moon.  At least I suppose it always hangs there, for though it seemed to us very wonderful, every one else seemed used to it.

Like Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by moonlight.  There could not have been a finer moonlit night, I thought, than that cold, crisp one upon which my companion stood for two hours beside the rotunda, gazing at the lawn and drawing it, its frosty grass and trees decked with diamonds, its white columns standing out softly from their shadow backgrounds like phosphorescent ghosts in the luminous blue darkness.  Until I was nearly frozen I stayed there with him.  That drawing cost him one of the worst colds he ever had.

The university ought to have, and has, many traditions, and life there ought to be, and is, different from life in any other college.  Jefferson brought from Italy the men who carved the capitals of the columns (the descendants of some of these Italian workmen live in Charlottesville to-day), and when the columns were in place he brought from Europe the professors to form the faculty, creating what was practically a small English university in the United States.  Never until, a dozen years ago, Dr. E.A.  Alderman became president, had there been such an office; before that time the university had a rector, and the duties of president were performed by a chairman of the faculty, elected by the faculty from among its members.  This was the first university to adopt the elective system, permitting the students, as Jefferson wrote, “uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall attend,” instead of prescribing one course of reading for all.  No less important, the University of Virginia was the first college to introduce (1842) the honor system, and still has the most complete honor system to be found among American colleges.  This system is an outgrowth of the Jeffersonian idea of student self-government; under it each student signs, with examination papers, a pledge that he has neither given nor received assistance.  That is found sufficient; students are not watched, nor need they be.  With time this system has been extended, so that it now covers not only examinations, but many departments of college life, eliminating professionalism in athletics and plagiarism in literary work, and resulting in a delightful mutual confidence between the student body and the faculty.

Madison and Monroe were active members of the university’s first board of visitors; the first college Y.M.C.A. was started there; and among many famous men who have attended the university may be mentioned Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose name appears thus upon the “University Magazine” for 1879-80, as one of its three editors.  The ill-starred Poe attended the university for only one year, at the end of which time his adopted father, Mr. Allan, of Richmond, withdrew him because of debts he had contracted while acquiring his education in gambling and drinking champagne.  Poe’s former room, No. 13 West Range, is now the office of the magazine.