On a grand square stand the chief public buildings, and they present an appearance that would be commanding in Paris or London. The senate-house stretches across one side of the square, the Lutheran church adorns another, the university fills a third, and from the fourth a broad avenue opens, half a mile long, to the foot of a hill crowned with an OBSERVATORY. The University of Finland! In our ignorance, we had associated Finlanders with the Laps and the Esquimaux, and had never thought of letters and science and art in connection with this race. Among the pleasures of a visit to Finland we had not reckoned an introduction to a venerable university, endowed, sustained, and flourishing on a par with those of Germany. In fact, very few of the German universities have accommodations and advantages equal to this at Helsingfors. It would be considered first-class in England or France, and there is nothing comparable to it in the United States. It has a magnificent stone edifice of architectural proportions and finish, that make the building a perpetual lecture on the beautiful and sublime in art; and within is the most complete system of rooms for every department of knowledge here pursued,—for museums, laboratories, lectures, recitations. The professors were in session in the great audience-room as we entered it; the place was adorned with a full-length portrait of the Emperor Alexander I., who is styled, in the Latin inscription, “the father of his country and the university.” The prophecy is added that art will preserve his features, and his fame will fill the whole earth. The professors seemed an earnest set of men, mostly young, all fine-looking and well dressed. I took them to be happy and successful in their calling, and I wished much that I understood their language, so as to enter into the sympathies of a set of scholars giving their lives to the pursuits of science in Finland. The university has five separate departments, law, medicine, theology, &c., with _thirty-one professors_, and it is older than any university in Russia. It was founded in 1630 by the Empress Christina, eleven years before the art of printing was introduced into Finland. Its charter was signed by Axel Oxenstiern, a famous name in his country’s annals. The library contains 200,000 volumes, in all languages and in every realm of human learning. It is admirably arranged in a series of beautiful rooms, in niches and galleries, having an air of repose and seclusion inviting to quiet study, such as Ptolemy anticipated when he put over the Alexandrian doors the fitting inscription, “The food of the soul.”