Harvard College by an Oxonian (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Harvard College by an Oxonian

How many Presidents of the United States - Presidents, at least, in their confident ambition - were passing by me!

How vast was the change since those far-distant days when the fair and comely edifice of freshly - cut timber in which the infant University was lodged, on a narrow strip Of land bordering a pleasant river, was thought by some to be too gorgeous for a wilderness, and yet too mean, in others' appro hensions, for a college!1 Oxford, not many years earlier, had seen rise amid the meadows outside her city walls, that graceful pile in which the Gothic college and the ancient Jacobean mansion are SO happily blended. The fair monu ment which Nicholas Wadham raised to himself is durable, for it is built in stone. NO less durable is the monument which John Harvard helped to raise, built though it was with unseasoned wood. This home Of learning was destined to prove an abiding city; for its foundations rested, not on the piety of any one man, but on the zeal and the affection of a high-minded community. A man Of great nobility of charac ter presided over the General Court Of the Colony which passed the first vote of money towards a school or college. It was Henry Vane Milton's Vane, young in years, but in sage counsels Old. He links Harvard to Oxford, for it was in Magdalen, most beautiful of colleges, that he had studied. His statue might well stand beside the Puritan minister's, under the shadow of the noble hall which commemorates the brave men who, two hundred years later, fell in the defence of that liberty for which Harvard crossed the sea, and for which Vane gave his life.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Harvard College by an Oxonian

In the summer and early autumn of last year, I spent in all nearly two months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the seat of Harvard College, the first and the oldest of American universities. A young graduate of the College, with whom I had fallen into talk on my outward voyage, as we paced the deck of the Cephalonia, had begged me not to keep Oxford in my memory when I visited the American Cambridge. Oxford's ancient towers, her chapels and cloisters, her halls, her quadrangles and her lawns, High Street and Broad Street, Magdalen Bridge, and the massive ivy-mantled city walls, all made his heart sink within him when he thought of his own beloved Alma Mater. Dear as she was to him, how could she be dear to one in whose mind there always lived the image of the most beautiful and the most venerable of all universities? "'Oxford,' Southey once playfully said, 'is a place to make an American unhappy.'" Some touch of this unhappiness seemed to have fallen upon my companion as he then spoke to me. There was no need for it. If Oxford has ever made a single American unhappy, Harvard on many a summer day has made at all events one Englishman happy.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.