As you have talked a good deal in your letter about the college and its prospects, I suppose I may be allowed to say a few words about it in reply, though to be sure I have already said more than was perhaps proper in one like myself, who am not even a graduate there, and shall very probably get no other answer to what I may venture to say hereafter than that I should do better to mind my books, and let those who are intrusted with the affairs of ye (_sic_) college take care of them. I cannot, however, shut my eyes on the fact, that one _very_ important and principal cause of the difference between our University and the one here is the different value we affix to a good library, and the different ideas we have of what a good library is. In America we look on the Library at Cambridge as a wonder, and I am sure nobody ever had a more thorough veneration for it than I had; but it was not necessary for me to be here six months to find out that it is nearly or quite half a century behind the libraries of Europe, and that it is much less remarkable that our stock of learning is so small than that it is so great, considering the means from which it is drawn are so inadequate. But what is worse than the absolute poverty of our collections of books is the relative inconsequence in which we keep them. We found new professorships and build new colleges in abundance, but we buy no books; and yet it is to me the most obvious thing in the world that it would promote the cause of learning and the reputation of the University ten times more to give six thousand dollars a year to the Library than to found three professorships, and that it would have been wiser to have spent the whole sum that the new chapel had cost on books than on a fine suite of halls. The truth is, when we build up a literary Institution in America we think too much of convenience and comfort and luxury and show; and too little of real, laborious study and the means that will promote it. We have not yet learnt that the Library is not only the first convenience of a University, but that it is the very first necessity,—that it is the life and spirit,—and that all other considerations must yield to the prevalent one of increasing and opening it, and opening it on the most liberal terms to _all_ who are disposed to make use of it. I cannot better explain to you the difference between our University in Cambridge and the one here than by telling you that here I hardly say too much when I say that it _consists_ in the Library, and that in Cambridge the Library is one of the last things thought and talked about,—that here they have forty professors and more than two hundred thousand volumes to instruct them, and in Cambridge twenty professors and less than twenty thousand volumes. This,