[25]
the library begets a sort of sadness.
Nowhere does one feel so much the force of the old saying: “Time is short: art is long.”
As you loiter in the alcoves you cannot help thinking how few of so many books you can ever read.
And isn't it the sadder thought, how few of them are worth reading?
Some of the winter courses of lectures have been announced and make me regret the necessity of my going away to teach school.
Mr. Dana the poet begins next week a course of literature.
Night before last John Quincy Adams delivered an introductory lecture.
He will be followed by several distinguished gentlemen.
Professor Walker, a man of truly great mind, is to give twelve lectures on natural theology, and Professor Silliman, I know not how many on geology, besides others almost as attractive.
We now learn for the first time that
Dana's ambition was not limited to mastering the course at Harvard.
As we have seen, he had been disappointed in his arrangements for money, and had been compelled to take refuge among his relations for the purpose of economizing.
But still greater economies were necessary, and in his letter to
Barrett he recalls a plan they must have talked over together:
My purpose of going to Germany grows fixed and definite.
I am told that I can live there at a university for fifty dollars a year, and can earn something besides by teaching English.
If at the end of my junior year, I can get hold of two or three hundred dollars, I shall go, and then, God willing, I shall write you letters from Germany. ....
... After the 27th of November till the beginning of the next term, I shall be at Scituate, Massachusetts, engaged in cultivating the tender young idea.
On November 21, 1840, he wrote to his friend
Dr. Flint, at
Buffalo, and while this letter covers the subjects alluded to in the letter to
Barrett, it not only does so much more fully, but brings in new matter of interest,
