In due time Emerson went to Harvard, entering the class of 1821. Here he earned part of his expenses and profited by scholarships, which must have been given him more on account of his character than because of his actual performance as a student, for he stood only in the middle of his class. He was almost hopelessly weak in mathematics, but he won three prizes in essay-writing and declamation. He was a regular member of one of the debating societies, crossing swords with his opponents on the vague and impossible subjects which lure the minds of youth. His appointment as class poet at graduation argues no special distinction, for it was conferred on him after seven others had refused it. All the while, however, his mind had been active, and he came out from college with the fruits of a great amount of good reading which had doubtless somewhat distracted him from the assigned work. Emerson's experience at college should not be confused with that of many budding geniuses who showed their originality by mere eccentricity. With Emerson, as with Hawthorne and Thoreau too, the independence appeared simply in his choosing the things at which he should do his hardest work. He was full of ambition. An entry in the Journal of 1822 proves that at this age he was more like the Puritan Milton than the care-free Cooper: "In twelve days I shall be nineteen years old, which I count a miserable thing. Has any other educated person lived so many years and lost so many days?" He blamed himself for dreaming of greatness and doing little to achieve it, but he decided not yet to give up hope of belonging to the "family of giant minds." Already, too, he was in thought joining his own future with the future of the country in such jottings as these. "Let those who would pluck the lot of immortality from Fate's urn, look well to the future of America." "To America, therefore, monarchs look with apprehension and the people with hope." If his countrymen could boast no great accomplishment in the arts, "We have a government and a national spirit that is better than persons or histories." The judges of his own future utterances were to be a nation of free minds, "for in America we have plucked down Fortune and set up Nature in his room." These comments, of course, reveal the sentiment and the lofty rhetoric of the commencement orator, for they were all written before he was twenty-two. In later years he wrote more simply and less excitedly, but he never forgot that his own life was always part of the life of the nation.