After his graduation, he studied law one year in the Dane Law School of Harvard College. It was at this time that _The Collegian_, a periodical published by a number of the Harvard under-graduates, was started at Cambridge. To this paper the young law student sent numerous anonymous contributions, among them "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Height of the Ridiculous," "The Meeting of the Dryads," and "The Spectre Pig." A brilliant little journal it must have been with Holmes' inimitable outbursts of wit, "Lochfast's" (William H. Simmons) translations from Schiller, and the numerous pen thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert Habersham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote under the respective signatures of "Charles Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and "Geoffery La Touche." Young Motley, too, was an occasional contributor to _The Collegian_, and his brother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes and Epes Sargent, in 1833, in writing a gift book called "The Harbinger," the profits of which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for the blind. FOOTNOTES: [6] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes. CHAPTER V. ABROAD. After a year's study of law, during which time the Muses were constantly tempting him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," young Holmes determined to take up the study of medicine, which was much more congenial to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his associates were his instructors for the following two years and a half; and then before taking his degree of M.D., he spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. Of this European tour, we find occasional allusions scattered throughout his writings. Listen, for instance, to this grand description of Salisbury Cathedral: "It was the first cathedral we ever saw, and none has ever so impressed us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these paleozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes.... These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison, what are best worth seeing of man's handiwork in Europe." "Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident in _undress_ often affects us more than one in full costume." Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?