To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers some striking exceptions. It was not the large and fashionable university that it has lately grown to be, with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, and its somewhat motley collection of undergraduates; but a small school of the classics and mathematics, with something of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages added to its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very homogeneous _clientele_, drawn mainly from the Unitarian families of eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in many respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years covered by this chapter than nowadays at the same place, or at any date in any other American university town. The neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial life has never so entirely overlain the intellectual as in New York and Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible. From these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient as teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the world. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was. In 1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard, Sumner was lecturing in the Law School. The following year--in which Thoreau took his bachelor's degree--witnessed the delivery of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the _American Scholar_ in the college chapel, and Wendell Phillips's speech on the _Murder of Lovejoy_ in Faneuil Hall. Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, was an under-graduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Holmes had been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School--a position which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The former's first important publication, _Ferdinand and Isabella_, appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23, and the initial volume of his _History of the United States_ was issued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts school of historical writers,