eque deum_, with loved and honored companions, in
the bonds of a friendship that can be realized only in youth, under the
inspiration of a common intellectual purpose, and, one is tempted to
add, in the atmosphere of college halls; next arise golden hours passed
in the library; and lastly there come back other hours, not always
golden, spent in the classroom. This is, of course, only to enumerate
the three influences that are, or should be, strongest in a student's
life: the society of his fellows, his private reading, and his studies.
Of these three factors of culture the first and the last are fairly
constant, but the second is apt to vary in the experience of any small
group of students from the foremost place, as in the case of John Hay,
to no place at all. It is of this varying element in the student's
conduct of life that I have undertaken to write.

Unless student intercourse has an intellectual basis, such as reading
furnishes, it has nothing to distinguish it from any other good
fellowship and can hardly escape triviality. The little groups of
students at Cambridge which included such members as the three
Tennysons, Hallam, Spedding, Fitzgerald, and Thackeray, while they were
no doubt jovial enough, were first of all intellectual associations,
where

Thought leapt out to wed with Thought
Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.

In such companionship men not only share and correct the culture which
they have acquired in private, but they are stimulated to higher and
wider attainment. The classroom at its best is hardly equal to a good
book; from its very nature it must address an abstract average rather
than the individual, while a good book startles us with the intimacy of
its revelation to ourselves. The student goes to college to study; he
has his name thence. But while the classroom is busied, patiently,
sedulously doling him out silver, he discovers that there is gold lying
all around, which he may take without asking. Twenty-five years after he
finds that the silver has grown black with rust, while the gold shines
on untarnished. Librarians are often besought for a guide in reading, a
set of rules, a list of books. But what is really needed, and what no
mentor can give, is a hunger and thirst after what is in books; and this
the student must acquire for himself or forego the blessing. Culture
cannot be vicarious. This is not to say that a list of books may not be
useful, or that one set of boo