Of Freshmen and Almighty God!

O thou who oft hast aptly said

That doves are not from eagles bred,

That great men always have great sons,

Predestined for Fame's benisons!

O thou who, by thy winsome tricks,

Art first in Freshmen firm to fix

A clear idea of what must be

That mystic, unknown Faculty!

The thing breaks off; at least the rest of it is illegible. Evidently four or five verses were written on the other side of the sheet.

2D S. But what does it all mean? The first verse plainly refers to an equal facility in the performance of duties professional and ecclesiastical, and the last implies that the "thou" referred to was the first visible embodiment of a type which had previously been dimly comprehended. It must be a satire on some Yale instructor. No doubt some Yale man wrote it and lost it on his visit here with the Nine. It's written in blue ink, - of course a Yale man wrote it.

1ST S. Of course a Yale man wrote it. And yet the sentences are all grammatical; the second verse, too, has a classical touch, - a reference to one of Horace's odes.

2D S. You see nothing in it, I suppose.

1ST S. Yes, a certain cleverness.

2D S. There's something else in what it intimates. I confess I am not yet able to be reconciled to the separation of great wisdom from great character. The former, if present without the latter, can lay no claim to merit. If men forget that we have had four centuries of printing, and so seek to make encyclopaedias of themselves, they must pay the penalty of their forgetfulness, for the days of the admiration of walking dictionaries are past. It is this absence of character which these verses intimate, and an absence of the respect which character would have inspired, but without which wisdom is belittled and its aspect made deplorable.