shelters, with plain wooden huts and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds
about the buildings. They are only lately beginning to acquire fine
buildings with pleasing surroundings; that is, they are just beginning
to carry into practice 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 scho