64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and had better seek by themselves. Let them ferment. Of course you can help 

 many a restless spirit, when he wishes to be helped — but you can do it as well 

 here as at Cambridge. 



Mr. Eobert Treat Paine wrote : 



College life is full of fun and froth and frolic and frivolity and scurrility. 

 It is acutely critical. It turns into sport everything, sacred and profane. Life 

 is free there first — full of joy and sparkle, full of study and sports, absorbed 

 and preoccupied. Entire absence of variety in experience; death, marriage, 

 children, business, failure, sickness, suffering, danger, all that makes adult life 

 so full — none of all this enters the life of the student. . . . Surely this is the 

 least impressible part of life. It is not responsive, it has no magnetism in it.^ 



That the best youth seeking truth in a university " had better seek 

 by themselves " and that youth (at least if at college) " is the least im- 

 pressible part of life " are doctrines of precisely the tendency that 

 occasions the present article. 



It would be grossly unfair to take these remarks, dropped as they 

 were in the course of a heartfelt argument for the surpassing value of 

 Phillips Brooks's work in Boston, as though they stood for the whole 

 thought or final attitude, on the subject, of the writers' minds. And 

 no doubt Brooks solved his personal problem with a wise caution in 

 refusing to leave his own rich field for one untried. What the letters 

 completely miss, however, is the fact that the extraordinary conjunction 

 in college youth of the freshly acquired faculties of manhood with free- 

 dom from manhood's burdens and chilling memories is not a mere 

 hindrance to the great leader but an extraordinary opportunity. Appre- 

 ciation of certain things has not come in youth because experience of 

 them in oneself has not come; but the liberated energies are ready for 

 ardor and enterprise and generous impulse as those of the burdened and 

 hard-worked can never be. Have we not heard of something called 

 youthful enthusiasm and of something called youthful idealism? A 

 writer of genius has described youth as " cold and pitiless." That is, 

 though it sees (with what sharpness !), its sympathies fail much, because 

 it has not felt for itself such things as are behind the face it sees. That 

 is the sole reason, for the youth flus the experience (might it be re- 

 membered?) is the material of which the less "pitiless" man is made. 

 No one can long observe the studentry of a college, watching them in 

 their sports and crises, without seeing a fire ready to be kindled, 

 waiting only for the spark. If college youth are cold on their more 

 serious side it has at least something to do with the fact that so many 

 of the minds with which they come in contact are absolute non-con- 

 ductors of heat. 



It will perhaps be clear at this point why I can not forego the human 



1 Allen, " Life of Phillips Brooks," Vol. II., ch. 10. 



