“Thus by the power of Jove’s imperial arm
     The boiling ocean trembled into calm.”

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and sentimentally.  My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted.  Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof, suspended by iron rods.  Subject, Fancy.  Treatment, brief but comprehensive, illustrating the magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life into forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,—­the gift of Heaven to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon to the monarch on his throne; from the burning sands of the desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles, from—­but I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover.  I went from the Academy to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again for a long time.

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for many years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more found myself at the station,—­just at the foot of the hill.  My first pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing by the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held, buried in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks.  I then began the once familiar toil of ascending the long declivity.  Academic villages seem to change very slowly.  Once in a hundred years the library burns down with all its books.  A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new library begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor, for the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone.  The story of them must be told succinctly.  It is like the opium-smoker’s showing you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the new library building on my left.  But for these it was surprising to see how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed.  The Professors’ houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old.  The pale brick seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if “Hollis” and “Stoughton” had been transplanted from Cambridge,—­carried there in the night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa.  Away to my left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.