If we would know what a university is, considered in its most elementary idea, we must betake ourselves to the first and most beautiful home of European civilization, to the bright and beautiful Athens,--Athens, whose schools drew to her bosom, and then sent back to the business of life, the youth of the Western world for a long thousand years. Seated on the verge of the continent, the city seemed hardly suited for the duties of a central metropolis of knowledge; yet what it lost in convenience of approach, it gained in its neighborhood to the traditions of the mysterious East, and in the loveliness of the region in which it lay. Hither, then, as to a sort of ideal land, where all the archetypes of the great and the fair were found in substantial being, and all departments of truth explored, and all diversities of intellectual power exhibited; where taste and philosophy were majestically enthroned as in a royal court; where there was no sovereignty but that of mind, and no nobility but that of genius; where professors were rulers and princes did homage,--hither flocked continually from the very corners of the _orbis terrarum_, the many-tongued generation, just rising or just risen into manhood, in order to gain wisdom. [Footnote 7: From Volume III of the "Historical Sketches."] Pisistratus[8] had at an early age discovered and nursed the infant genius of his people, and Cimon,[9] after the Persian war, had given it a home; that war had established the naval supremacy of Athens; she had become an imperial state; and the Ionians, bound to her by the double chain of kindred and of subjection, were importing into her both their merchandise and their civilization. The arts and philosophy of the Asiatic Court were easily carried across the sea, and there was Cimon, as I have said, with his ample fortune, ready to receive them with due honor. Not content with patronizing their profession, he built the first of those noble porticoes, of which we hear so much in Athens, and he formed the groves, which in process of time formed the celebrated academy. Planting is one of the most graceful, as in Athens it was one of the most beneficent, of employments. Cimon took in hand the wild wood, pruned and drest it, and laid it out with handsome walks and welcome fountains. Nor, while hospitable to the authors of the city's civilization, was he ungrateful to the instruments of her prosperity. His trees extended their cool, umbrageous branches over the merchants who assembled in the Agora, for many generations. [Footnote 8: Pisistratus flourished from 605 B.C. until 527. He was a friend of Solon, but usurped supreme power in 560; was twice expelled and then restored to power. He is usually credited with a notable systematic attempt to preserve the Works of Homer.] [Footnote 9: Cimon died in 449 B.C. He was a son of Miltiades and defeated the Persians on both sea and land in 466.]