ngdom of words.

I was once asked by a doctor of divinity, who was also the overseer of a
college, whether I ever knew any one to look back with pleasure upon his
early studies in Latin and Greek. It was like being asked if one looked
back with pleasure on summer mornings and evenings. No doubt those
languages, like all others, have fared hard at the hands of pedants; and
there are active boys who hate all study, and others who love the
natural sciences alone. Indeed, it is a hasty assumption, that the
majority of boys hate Latin and Greek. I find that most college
graduates, at least, retain some relish for the memory of such studies,
even if they have utterly lost the power to masticate or digest them.
"Though they speak no Greek, they love the sound on't." Many a
respectable citizen still loves to look at his Horace or Virgil on the
shelf where it has stood undisturbed for a dozen years; he looks, and
thinks that he too lived in Arcadia.... The books link him with culture,
and universities, and the traditions of great scholars.

On some stormy Sunday, he thinks, he will take them down. At length he
tries it; he handles the volume awkwardly, as he does his infant; but it
is something to be able to say that neither book nor baby has been
actually dropped. He likes to know that there is a tie between him and
each of these possessions, though he is willing, it must be owned, to
leave the daily care of each in more familiar hands....

I must honestly say that much of the modern outcry against classical
studies seems to me to be (as in the case of good Dr. Jacob Bigelow) a
frank hostility to literature itself, as the supposed rival of science;
or a willingness (as in Professor Atkinson's
case) to tolerate modern literature, while discouraging the study of the
ancient. Both seem to commit the error of drawing their examples of
abuse from England, and applying their warnings to America.... Because
the House of Commons was once said to care more for a false quantity in
Latin verse than in English morals, shall we visit equal indignation on
a House of Representatives that had to send for a classical dictionary
to find out who Thersites was?...

Granted, that foreign systems of education may err by insisting on the
arts of literary structure too much; think what we should lose by
dwelling on them too little! The magic of mere words; the mission of
language; the worth of form as well as of matter; the power to make a
common