his slim figure clad in mourning." And if I glance into the courtyard, it is to see what, more than half a century before that, young Harry Esmond had seen in the courtyard of that same Castlewood. "There was in the court a peculiar silence somehow:- the sky bright overhead; the buttresses of the building and the sun-dial casting shadows over the gilt memento mori inscribed underneath; the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel nearly white, the one with his face up to the sun, and the other snuffling amongst the grass and stones, and my lord leaning over the fountain, which was bubbling audibly." My lord, who should go away on the morrow to London, to pick a quarrel with that evil Lord Mohun, a quarrel over the cards, but about my lady, and be done to death at midnight, in Leicester Field!

Following the crowd would seem to have brought us into rather fine company! That, no doubt, is usually the crowd's instinct and an instinct that is gratified easily enough when the company is dead, and entombed in the Abbey, or brought to life again in well-known novels and histories. Not an unerring instinct, however; the unexclusive sight-seer does not always choose his guides wisely. He may prefer Bulwer or Mrs. Ward to Sir Walter or Thackeray. We cannot, after all, accompany him without reserves. Nor can even this present humility persuade us that there will not be times when we will none of his companionship. If he prove such an one as at Florence, on the Ponte Vecchio, the sunset almost gone and the first lights twinkling in the tall, crowding rookeries that once were palaces, must break silence with an inane "Historic old city, sir!" we should again, undoubtedly, rebuff him with some muttered unfriendliness. Although, if we would not forego the very chiefest delights of travel, we must follow the beaten track, we would yet reserve some right of choice of companionships; at any rate, the right to be sometimes alone.

To be alone in the beaten track: in the

track of empire, of conquests and worldly glory; of the few who have led, the multitude which has followed, in all manner of enterprise and achievement; of armies and priestly processions; of kings and saints and warriors and poets and the quite silent millions that won no fame; to feel one's self alone in the wide pathway which the human spirit has blazed through the centuries this may well be the highest experience which travel in older lands can yield. Not a cheerful experience always, or usually; oftener solemn, and sometimes daunting; but if known once, sure to be sought again.

London's vastness yields it still. At midday, in the city, in the shadow of St. Paul's, close by the spot where Milton was born and the site of that Mermaid Tavern which knew Shakespeare, where countless narrow streets and mews, strangely denizened, pour out their teeming life into the great thoroughfares, already full, and roaring with the dull roar of London, one feels one's self in the centre of what for ages has been the chief highway of the trade of all the nations, one listens to the sordid heart-throbs of the world. The Strand at midnight is almost equally a world's highway of garish pleasures and coarse appetites — coarser, surely, in this English Babylon than in any other capital. But the stiller hours are best.

Should the chance ever come to you, pass at dawn the gloomy dawn of a true London day-down Whitehall, between the gray, stately-solemn rows of government buildings, to Westminster bridge; look up at the pigeons circling in the first light around the giant watch-tower, and revealing its cliff-like height; watch first the Abbey and then, closer at hand, the statues of England's statesmen in Parliament Square, emerging from the night-mist; the streets slowly revealing themselves, and stretching away like damp, gloomy cañons; the advance guard of the day's traffic rumbling sullenly over the bridge; the heavy, unuplifted faces of the many who, at that drear hour,

must take up the day's long toil, the dogged race whose labors, sodden and serious, yet inspired for centuries with the strange instinct and grim resolve of empire, have piled up all this sombre, dim magnificence, and you will have such a vision of the true might and glory of the English race as you shall never win from any wandering in by-paths.

Here is that slow result of time of which our America does not yet yield us the sense. In presence of it all, we understand better our own pioneer office in this present world. We comprehend, not without awe and trembling, the endlessness of that old human procession which we have ushered across a new continent, to repeat there, and in Pacific seas, the old struggles, the old heroisms, brutalities, glories, agonies. We begin to see plainly that our own immunity from the fiercer strifes, the grimmer and more sordid rivalries, that the laxness among us of the cruel law of all the earth, is but for a little while. The fresh path we have blazed must become, that also, — and at no distant day, a beaten track.

Once in this train, the mind roves backward as well as forward - from the beaten tracks of to-day and to-morrow to those of yesterday, in which men walk no longer; to the abandoned highways of the world's trade and warfare and art and religion. England, we all know, has grown so great by becoming the chief mart of all the world; and this she could do only by getting the mastery of the sea and by the continuing superiority of her seamen, and by the excellence of her workers, helped by her climate and resources, in many manufactures. But it is not many centuries since she had neither of these two supremacies. Florence was long rich with the profits she earned by turning the coarse products of English looms into fine woolens and broadcloths. The cloth-makers of the Low Countries also excelled England's until, late in the sixteenth century, Spanish persecution drove the Flemish weavers across the channel. The sea was Spain's,

The

There, indeed, is our best modern instance of the waywardness of what Lord Morley once called " the tides of human circumstance." Who would measure that waywardness has but to pass from the roar of Cheapside to the petty chattering of the Rialto; from Westminster to the silent court of the matchless palace where doges dwell no longer; from Thames Mouth, crowded with shipping, to the empty lagoons that once harbored the commerce of Europe and Asia. British Mediterranean squadron sometimes visits Venice, anchoring off the Lido. It was an unforgettable lesson in the irony of the fate of nations to look out, as I did one afternoon, from that narrow strand, once a camping ground of crusaders, now degraded into a sort of Coney Island, upon those gray reminders of Northern power, lying there sinister and silent, rolling gently in the soft Adriatic surges, then turn about and behold, bathed in sunset glories Turner has not caught, the city of pearl: her whose galleys, holding the Eastern gates of the Mediterranean, were for centuries the defense of Christendom against the Turk.

That is the lesson and monition of all Europe; and a lesson Europe itself knows only too well. England, for all her wealth and power and world-wide extension, is so mindful of it that the seeming menace of Germany's growing navy and expanding trade obsesses Parliament and the press. The greater the poverty and overcrowding among her own people, the more battleships she builds. Never in history, in fact, have the powers watched each other with more hawklike eyes. The mightiest are the most fearful. Greece revivified into a pale aftermath of her

ancient glory, Germany and Italy reunited, have not for a moment blinded them to the everlasting law of growth, mutability, decay. Their continent, unlike ours, is strewn with mementos of it. Their seas warn us solemnly. How many times has not the Mediterranean changed mistresses? Since Rome fell, at least once every three or four centuries. And before Rome it was the same, back to the day when Matthew Arnold's grave Tyrian trader

Descried at sunrise an emerging prow
Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily,
The fringes of a Southward-facing brow
Among the Ægean isles:

And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian
wine,

Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in
brine:

And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young, light-hearted masters of the

waves.

Lands and seas, cities and wastes, all is in this sense alike. All has been many times won and lost, and everywhere is the consciousness that what has been won and lost so often may be won or lost again. What now flourishes may be desolated; what is now desolate has flourished, and may flourish again. Gradually an American perceives that the entire continent is still battlefield as well as graveyard. The ways are all highways; the by-paths also are beaten tracks.

That sense of it all makes us prize our own national exemptions more highly. It tends to make of us chauvinists members of peace societies.

or'

And this is what we feel also in a more individual way: not for our country only, but for ourselves. The comparative immunity of America from the acuter sort of international rivalries is no greater, and no more precious, than the comparative immunity of Americans from that more heart-breaking rivalry of man with man, merchant with merchant, worker with worker, artist with artist, beggar with beggar, drab with drab, pimp with pimp, which Europe endlessly displays.

That way, it is the older world which shows savagely democratic, coarsely unreserved, nakedly human. The struggle and competition is universal, ceaseless. Every advantage of birth, station, talents, possessions, is seized ruthlessly, wielded remorselessly. The overcrowded earth, yielding not enough for all, is contested and trampled over as in the silent rage of beasts. Men barter frankly what we have not yet come to treat as objects of possession. The least service must be paid for; the gracefulest and noblest-seeming may be meant for pay. Whatever can possibly have value is accurately valued. Hopes and expectations cannot be, as with us, general and vague; they must have their entirely reasoned sources and directions. None expect the unexpected. No lesson of human experience is neglected. Aspiration and generosity are as calculating as avarice and hunger. Art is as clear-eyed as trade. It is as if all took the beaten track. Life is accepted on its own universal, its own hard and final terms.

And yet there is aspiration and generosity; there is love and sacrifice; there is achievement, and on the noblest lines; there are keen delights. Beauty is not merely possessed as an heirloom, finished and unalterable, but cultivated as a vital principle. It is we, they declare, who are sordid, uninspired, incapable of joyousness. Their acceptance is not despair; it is even, on the whole, something better than resignation.

That is the heartening; not enough, perhaps, to countervail the chill which Europe sheds upon our inexperience, but enough, unless our own spirit is weak, to keep us firm against its daunting. Although walking in the beaten track teach us to go more cautiously, more slowly, it need not subdue us into any slinking gait -surely not into any cowering pause. Although the seeming-boundless range of our opportunity will narrow swiftly, there is yet time to win from it a kind of freedom and symmetry, now unattainable by those pent-up, close-grappled

No part of our educational system occasions such searchings of heart or shakings of head as does the college. Every where else in the field of education we have evidence of healthy growth, of vigorous life. The high school not many years ago maintained an apologetic attitude toward a public which grudgingly supported it, but now asserts itself as "the people's college." The graduate school, with its work of research, hardly known, even by name, a generation ago, is to-day established, not only as part of our universities, but also as part of the scheme of public education. The schools of medicine and law have doubled and trebled their demands upon the student who seeks entrance to the professions whose doors they guard. It seems to some of the less hopeful members of our college faculties that, amid these growing and spreading institutions, the college course is likely to be crowded and starved out of existence. From below, the high school has threatened to absorb a year or two of its time. Graduate and professional schools have reached down to snatch away its students from the last year, or even two years, of the course.

The college teacher has lived between these forces, in dread of losing his field of labor; fearing that when, like all Gaul, his domain was divided into three parts between high school, professional, and graduate schools, there would be as little left for his control as was left to the Gauls when Cæsar was through with them. Still more, he has felt that the temper of college studies and the nature of college students have altered and he may be pardoned for thinking -have worsened greatly. New studies have entered the college; many of them technical and alien to the old college

course. A new type of student has come, especially alien, seeking and expecting practical results rather than culture. And since all of these changes, present and threatened, have come upon him with bewildering rapidity, it is not surprising if he sometimes feels that the very life of the college is in danger. I do not share his apprehensions, believing that the college has a tough and enduring vitality. These changes, whose significance and importance I would not underrate, seem to me to have been the result of a natural evolution, which has thrown the emphasis of college activities and college teaching upon the intellectual rather than the ethical side of life.

Let me draw a little from my own college experience and observation, in order to characterize this change of temper a little more clearly. Forty years ago, I entered college · a small Eastern college, whose freshman class is now far larger than was the college of my day. I cannot boast that we, the "few but fit,” who were freshmen in 1869 were intellectual prodigies, of even or exceptionally distinguished excellence. The records of my class and college mates show that they have taken an honorable part in the world's work, but one not greatly different from that taken by college students of any period before or since. But we had at least one merit, or demerit, as contrasted with the freshmen of to-day. We did not come to college seeking studies which would directly prepare us for our future career. We entered on a four years' college course with no such definite plan. We came not merely for the sake of the knowledge which we might get from our studies; still less to secure a practical training for life; but for the sake of somewhat vague and intangible intellectual