LETTERS TO A FRIEND AT COLLEGE. 179 



et quibusdam aVds?'' There are your classmates A. and Z. who are en- 

 gaged in the same investigations as those of which you used to be so 

 fond, the one all imagination, the other "pure reason," between whom 

 you are the proper connecting link — the conductor to draw thunder and 

 lightning out of this positive and negative electricity. There are your 

 "Essays'" to be read before the Professor of Rhetoric, which you can 

 fill with any of your speculations, and make redolent of all your read- 

 ing and meditations. There is your "Literary Society," that true arena 

 of American College-life, where our future statesmen and demagogues, 

 lawyers and clergymen first essay their arms and learn the tactics of the 

 approaching campaign. 



These are a few of your facilities for study which make up the rou- 

 tine of your every-day life, and if they do not impel and hurry you 

 along with still accelerating velocity in your appropriate course, that is 

 to say, in the acquisition of knowledge and the mastering of principles, 

 then you must either be hopelessly stupid, or deep sunk in the mire of 

 indolence. The former supposition we will not for a moment entertain. 

 Stupidity and study are the antipodes of each other, and I can scarcely 

 conceive it possible for a dolt to gain admittance into the temple sacred 

 to Apollo and the Muses, whose arrows would soon transfix or their 

 jeers expel so daring an intruder. 



But well did our Archon, when admitting us into our Literary Soci- 

 ety say "Beware of Indolence'.'''' Indolence among students takes va- 

 rious forms. The most common is that of noveJ-rcadlvg. This is nat- 

 ural. The student cannot conceal the fact that his business is with 

 books, and therefore he imagines that the reading of this trash gives him 

 at least the appearance of study. Novels arc to the mind what ardent 

 spirits are to the body. They first stimulate into an unnatural activity 

 some of the faculties, particularly the imagination and passions, and 

 then leave it prostrated and unfit for ordinary duty, with a constant long- 

 ing after the dangerous drug. But not only do these books unfit you 

 for the proper exercise of your mind, but they likewise disgust you with 

 your present condition and employments whatever they may be, and un- 

 fit you for all the realities of after-life. The novelist, who possesses 

 any genius, converts you at once into another man. and transfers you 

 to another world entirely difierent from that in which you are habitually 

 to live. No wonder, then, that the habitual novel-reader is disgusted 

 with his studies and the slave of indolence. 



But a no less certain forerunner and accompaniment of indolence is 

 the ris'it'ing of female society., during term-time. We may apply to the 

 student what Horace savs of the athlete : 



