These words of Phillips Brooks. Mr. Edwin D. Mead thinks, should "be printed in letters of gold, and hung up in every home where parents are thinking of sending their children into private schools, thereby condemning them to a narrower and less sturdy education than that given by the State, while also thus withdrawing their own personal interest from the public schools, which need the personal interest and love of every earnest citizen to-day as they have never needed them before." From the Boston Latin School young Brooks went to Harvard College when he was about fifteen and a half years old. "The college attracted him with its promises," writes the Rev. Dr. Alexander McKenzie, in the May, 1893, _New England Magazine_. "Even the Triennial Catalogue was stimulating as he read there of twenty-five men named Phillips and twenty named Brooks, who had graduated from this university. The place for his own name which should join the two lines was inviting." And yet Phillips Brooks in no way distinguished himself in college, save, perhaps, in composition. His professors were such men as Agassiz, Longfellow, Asa Gray, Lowell, and others. During his junior year he roomed in Massachusetts Hall, and his senior year in Stoughton. One of Brooks's class writes, "He was a general favorite, always hearty and kindly, with an abounding sense of humor, which he carried with him through life.... No one could have surmised what profession he would choose, and almost any calling would have seemed appropriate." Mr. Robert Treat Paine, his classmate, says, "At college he cared little for sport, but preferred to read omniverously almost everything and anything that came in his way." Tennyson was an especial favorite. After graduation Brooks returned to the Boston Latin School, and became a tutor. Here he failed. He could not or would not be a strict disciplinarian, and he left the position. Francis Gardner, his former teacher, had said that he "never knew a man who had failed as a schoolmaster to succeed in any other occupation." In one case at least he was mistaken. The young man might and did fail as a schoolteacher; he was a great success as a preacher and a man. He went back to his college president, James Walker, to advise about his future work in life, and decided to enter the ministry. At the suggestion of his pastor, Dr. Alexander H. Vinton, of St. Paul's Church on Tremont Street, he went to a theological seminary at Alexandria, Va., in 1856. Here his piety seemed to deepen, as he gave himself to study and to mission work. He preached his first sermon in a little hamlet called Sharon, two or three miles from the seminary, urged to go thither by a classmate. The people were mostly poor whites and negroes, who, being plain themselves, enjoyed the plain preaching. The schoolhouse was soon crowded, and more came than could be accommodated.