sty vigor choose the good and reject the bad,--there is
plenty to make those three years rich with fruit imperishable, three
years nobly spent, even though one must pass over the Ass's Bridge to
get into the Temple of Honor.

Important changes in the Academical system have been recently announced,
and honors are henceforth to be accorded to the successful disciples in
moral and natural sciences. By the side of the old throne of Mathesis
they have placed two very useful fauteuils a la Voltaire. I have no
objection; but in those three years of life it is not so much the
thing learned as the steady perseverance in learning something that is
excellent.

It was fortunate, in one respect, for me that I had seen a little of the
real world,--the metropolitan,--before I came to that mimic one,--the
cloistral. For what were called pleasures in the last, and which might
have allured me, had I come fresh from school, had no charm for me
now. Hard drinking and high play, a certain mixture of coarseness
and extravagance, made the fashion among the idle when I was at the
University, console Planco,--when Wordsworth was master of Trinity; it
may be altered now.

But I had already outlived such temptations, and so, naturally, I was
thrown out of the society of the idle, and somewhat into that of the
laborious.

Still, to speak frankly, I had no longer the old pleasure in books. If
my acquaintance with the great world had destroyed the temptation to
puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to
practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived
from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that
I had no choice but to rush from the lonely room haunted by tempting
phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober Town the fever of the heart by
some violent bodily fatigue. The ardor which belongs to early youth, and
which it best dedicates to knowledge, had been charmed prematurely to
shrines less severely sacred. Therefore, though I labored, it was with
that full sense of labor which (as I found at a much later period of
life) the truly triumphant student never knows. Learning--that marble
image--warms into life, not at the toil of the chisel, but the worship
of the sculptor. The mechanical workman finds but the voiceless stone.

At my uncle's, such a thing as a newspaper rarely made its appearance.
At Cambridge, even among reading men, the newspapers had their due
importance. Polit