His college duties he performed with conscientious fidelity, and he found at times a genuine satisfaction in the free intercourse with his students over great subjects, yet he could not always overlook the immaturity of his pupils, and he was impatient at the sort of work outside of direct teaching which falls to the lot of college professors. The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I _hate_ lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn _all_ about anything, unless, indeed, it be some piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. Charles would be astonished to hear me read the Castilian tongue, now wellnigh as familiar to me as Castilian soap. If he wouldn’t be, _I am_. I am about as much ‘Spanish,’ tell him, ‘as a Connecticut segar.’” At the same time he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am busier than ever, and, I fear, fruitlessly. My Italian class are half of them drones, and this hinders my getting on as I would with the rest. I am studying Spanish, as I did German in Dresden, reading it in all my leisure time, and before long mean to make myself thorough in it. At forty a man learns fast. My Spanish class is a very good one. There are only five, and they all do their best. _Vacare musis_--what does that mean? I have almost forgotten.” “I champ the bit sometimes here,” he writes to the same a year later, “but God’s will be done! _Ancora imparo_, though I be in a go-cart. My Spanish recitations cost me some time and trouble as yet, for I make the students parse and construe with never-failing strictness. For this I have to study the grammar harder than any of them, for my Italian is always in my way with its slightly differing forms. However, I have learned more already than I should have thought possible a year ago, and I think some of the students seem to be interested.” Now and then he could make his college work and his _Atlantic_ work play into each other, but not often. “I have as yet only dipped into your last four volumes,” he writes 12 June, 1860, to R. G. White, “and those I keep for the same good time (i.e. vacation). I have to prepare some lectures on Shakespeare, and shall kill two birds with one stone by making use of your edition, and so enabling myself to write an intelligent notice of it for the _Atlantic_.”