There were three or four men of great ability in the Faculty of the University. One of these was Professor Joseph Henry, in those days the first natural philosopher and lecturer on science in America. I had the fortune in time to become quite a special _protege_ of his. Another was Professor James Alexander, who taught Latin, rhetoric, and mental philosophy. He was so clear-headed and liberally learned, that I always felt sure that he must at heart have been far beyond the bounds of Old School theology, but he had an iron Roman-like sternness of glance which quite suited a Covenanter. The most remarkable of all was Albert Dodd, Professor of Mathematics and Lecturer on Architecture. This man was a genius of such a high order, that had it not been for the false position in which he was placed, he would have given to the world great works. The false position was this: he was the chief pulpit orator of the old school, and had made war on the Transcendentalist movement in an able article in the _Princeton Review_ (which, by the way, was useful in guiding me to certain prohibited works, before unknown to me). But as he was a man of poetic genial feeling, he found himself irresistibly fascinated by what he had hunted down, and so read Plato, and when he died actually left behind him a manuscript translation of Spinoza's works! The reader may imagine what a marvellous _find_ I was to him. George Boker, who was ages beyond me in knowledge of the world--man and woman--said one day that he could imagine how Dodd sat and chuckled to hear me talk, which remark I did not at all understand and thought rather stupid. I remember that during my first call on him we discussed _Sartor Resartus_, and I expressed it as my firm conviction that the idea of the Clothes Philosophy had been taken from the Treatise on Fire and Salt by the Rosicrucian Lord Blaise. Then, in all _naivete_ and innocence of effect, I discussed some point in Kant's "Critic," and a few other trifles not usually familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite reading did not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. I remember, however, being very much surprised indeed at finding that the other students, in whom I expected to encounter miracles of learning, or youth far superior to myself in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite come up to my anticipations. However, as they were all far beyond me in mathematics, I supposed their genius had all gone in that direction, for well I knew that the toughest page in Fichte was a mere trifle compared to the awful terrors of the Rule of Three, and so treated them as young men who were my superiors in other and greater things.