The Perils of the Sailor's Life, A Recipe for Making College Reputation, The Regicides, (Townsend Prize Essay,) "STUDENT Life! Burschen Life! What a magic sound have these words for him who has learnt for himself their real meaning! What a swarm of recollections come over him, who has once visited that land, however long it may be since he returned homeward to a safer haven! Youth flies on wings of impatience towards this happy time; age, though indeed it may smile over the recollection of many a folly, recalls its memory with delight." Thus commences a book which no student can read without interest, though hardly appreciable by any other class-Howitt's Student Life of Germany. Its title is attractive; its contents curious as they are novel. Student Life! and that too in Germany, the land of smoke and beer, goblins and fairies, mysticism and wild speculation, profoundest knowledge and most laborious industry. We have always loved it; whether from an original or acquired notion we know not, but certain it is that we never listened to our old German teacher, as with pipe in mouth and smoke encircled head, he told us tales about his "Fatherland," without feeling our hearts go out towards it, and indulging the fond hope of one day treading its, to us, classic soil. Tacitus, too, in his masterly description, gave us no mean idea of its inhabitants in earlier times, while the language itself affords good proof of the strength and earnestness of their character at the present day. In the words of Arndt, one of their poets "That is the German's Fatherland, Where oaths are sworn by grasp of hand, Where in warm hearts sits love benign." Nor are the truthfulness and intensity of character of her sons the only things in which Germany is preeminent. Science, literature, and the arts, find in her bosom a most genial soil, receive a mos assiduous cultivation, and yield a golden harvest. These precious fruits are grasped and borne away by many an eager hand, and re produce in other lands their beneficent results. She has been in some departments of knowledge like a mountain in a vast plain, the fountain head and supporter of the many streams that come down to cheer and refresh the desert below. She has become, in a large degree, our teacher, and a popular one, if we we may judge by the constantly increasing attempts to avail ourselves of her instructions. Look at our text books; the great Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott is but an enlargement of that of the German Lexicographer Passow. Matthiæ, Zumpt, Buttman, Kühner, and Jacobs were all Germans; the best editions of Latin and Greek authors are either German or based upon the German. The names of Wolf, Heyne, Hermann, Monk, and many other critics, are familiar to every advanced scholar in classical literature, and acknowledged as the highest authorities. Who does not know that to the labors and talent of these, and such as these, the voluminous Anthon is indebted for all that is valuable in his editions of the classics? The students in Theology likewise must depend upon Germans. Gesenius, with his Hebrew Lexicon and Grammar, Mosheim, Neander, and Gieseler, in church history, play no small part in their course of study. But the Germans are not strong in books alone; they are giants with the retort and crucible, the blowpipe and galvanism; here also they are our teachers. It has indeed become an established rule with the young professors in our best institutions, to go to Germany and spend some years in studying, previous to entering permanently upon their duties as instructors at home. He Now, although from our books we know that there exists among the Germans a vast amount of learning, mind in its greatest activity, and genius in its fullest development, the ripest scholars and closest thinkers, we have little or no acquaintance with those institutions in which the mind is incited to this activity, this genius fostered and cherished, and such enormous attainments made in positive knowledge. I refer to the German Universities, for with these every learned man in Germany is in some way connected. The prevailing idea in regard to them is exceedingly vague and uncertain, and very far from being correct. Take, for example, the general notion of a German student; and in fact the notion that is frequently entertained by travelers who see them only at the beer-shops or railroad stations. is pictured out, or rather caricatured, as one who "has long hair, and an odd beard, and a great many scars upon his face; who wears an inconceivable сар, and smokes an enormous pipe, and whose college course consists of two parts-Duelling and Drinking." There is something very mysterious about him; he sits up late nights, smoking his long "Meerschaum," with his choppin of beer before him, conjuring up, mid smoke-wreaths and beer-fumes, those wild theories and transcendentalisms supposed to be inseparably connected with the German mind. He is also prodigiously fierce; indeed, with his moustache and rapier, almost invincible; perfectly lawless and reckless, leading a sort of bandit life; in fine, a walking anomaly-a public curiosity-something Barnum would be glad to put in his humbug |