In nothing can Germany manifest a better-grounded feeling of national pride than in this, its university system. Politically inert, divided into petty states, powerless, the ever-ready prey of more active or ambitious neighbors, it has played a pitiful _rôle_ in the world's history, with annals made up of petty feuds and jealousies and tyrannical meannesses, never working as one people, save when driven to extremity. With countless differences of dialect, manners, customs, it is one and national in nothing save in its literature, and feels that, through the high culture of its scholars, through the new paths its men of science have opened, through the profound investigations of the learned in every sphere, it holds its place at the head of every intellectual movement of the age. It feels that its universities are the laboratories whence issue the thoughts whose significance the world is ever more and more ready to acknowledge. France even, selfish and proud of its past supremacy in all things, has within the last quarter of a century laid aside much of its exclusiveness, and a Germanic infusion is perceptible through all the mannerism of the latest and best productions of the French school. Comparatively of late years is it, that the English mind has fairly come in contact with this German culture. Its first loud manifestation may be heard in the prose of Carlyle and his school; yet even now its influence has permeated our whole literature so much, that, when reading some of our latest poetry, tones and melodies will come like distant echoes from the groves on the hillsides where warble the nightingales of Germany.