ass of students in one of our
colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two
different aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme
cases to illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure
is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,--inelegant, partly from careless
attitudes, partly from ill-dressing,--the face is uncouth in feature, or
at least common,--the mouth coarse and unformed,--the eye unsympathetic,
even if bright,--the movements of the face are clumsy, like those of the
limbs,--the voice is unmusical,--and the enunciation as if the words were
coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other aspect
is commonly slender, his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,--his
features are regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is bright and
quick,--his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers
dance over their music, and his whole air, though it may be timid, and
even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what
to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the
first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a
pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to
bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of
life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than
their share of development,--the organs of thought and expression less
than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed.
A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration.
You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of will
and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very few
of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, in a large proportion
of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin
caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled
aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge.
There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and
all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary.
Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break
out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up
after they seem to have died out. At last