University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IV
HARVARD COLLEGE (1854–1858)

ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last
time down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston
Place, and felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy
that this experience was ended. Never before or afterwards in
his life did he close a period so long as four years without some
sensation of loss—some sentiment of habit—but school was
what in after life he commonly heard his friends denounce as
an intolerable bore. He was born too old for it. The same thing
could be said of most New England boys. Mentally they never
were boys. Their education as men should have begun at ten
years old. They were fully five years more mature than the English
or European boy for whom schools were made. For the purposes
of future advancement, as afterwards appeared, these first
six years of a possible education were wasted in doing imperfectly
what might have been done perfectly in one, and in any
case would have had small value. The next regular step was
Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation
after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams
had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them,
as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself
the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above
all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education
would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard
College seriously. All went there because their friends went
there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and
liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they
needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they
wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to

make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy
had given to the College a character of moderation, balance,
judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent
traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that
its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but
such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In
effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of
Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical
blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped.

The stamp, as such things went, was a good one. The chief
wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned
in it, teachers and taught. Sometimes in after life, Adams debated
whether in fact it had not ruined him and most of his companions,
but, disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably
less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It
taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from
bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong
prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready
to receive knowledge.

What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he
got from his mates. Speaking exactly, he got less than nothing,
a result common enough in education. Yet the College Catalogue
for the years 1854 to 1861 shows a list of names rather distinguished
in their time. Alexander Agassiz and Phillips Brooks led
it; H. H. Richardson and O. W. Holmes helped to close it. As a
rule the most promising of all die early, and never get their names
into a Dictionary of Contemporaries, which seems to be the only
popular standard of success. Many died in the war. Adams knew
them all, more or less; he felt as much regard, and quite as much
respect for them then, as he did after they won great names and
were objects of a vastly wider respect; but, as help towards education,
he got nothing whatever from them or they from him
until long after they had left college. Possibly the fault was his,
but one would like to know how many others shared it. Accident

counts for much in companionship as in marriage. Life offers
perhaps only a score of possible companions, and it is mere chance
whether they meet as early as school or college, but it is more than
a chance that boys brought up together under like conditions
have nothing to give each other. The Class of 1858, to which
Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New
Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace;
free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions;
not exceptionally quick; not consciously sceptical; singularly
indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile
to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but
little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of
their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others;
negative to a degree that in the long run became positive and
triumphant. Not harsh in manners or judgment, rather liberal
and open-minded, they were still as a body the most formidable
critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criticism.
They never flattered, seldom praised; free from vanity, they
were not intolerant of it; but they were objectiveness itself; their
attitude was a law of nature; their judgment beyond appeal,
not an act either of intellect or emotion or of will, but a sort of
gravitation.

This was Harvard College incarnate, but even for Harvard
College, the Class of 1858 was somewhat extreme. Of unity this
band of nearly one hundred young men had no keen sense, but
they had equally little energy of repulsion. They were pleasant to
live with, and above the average of students—German, French,
English, or what not—but chiefly because each individual appeared
satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet
to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still
easier when one has no pains.

Into this unusually dissolvent medium, chance insisted on enlarging
Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians
as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some

further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the
Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and
in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well
how thin an edge of friendship separated them in 1856 from mortal
enmity. One of the Virginians was the son of Colonel Robert
E. Lee, of the Second United States Cavalry; the two others who
seemed instinctively to form a staff for Lee, were town-Virginians
from Petersburg. A fourth outsider came from Cincinnati and
was half Kentuckian, N. L. Anderson, Longworth on the mother's
side. For the first time Adams's education brought him in contact
with new types and taught him their values. He saw the
New England type measure itself with another, and he was part
of the process.

Lee, known through life as "Roony," was a Virginian of the
eighteenth century, much as Henry Adams was a Bostonian of
the same age. Roony Lee had changed little from the type of his
grandfather, Light Horse Harry. Tall, largely built, handsome,
genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he
had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as
his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New
Englanders wanted command. For a year, at least, Lee was the
most popular and prominent young man in his class, but then
seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command
was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was
simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England
student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know
how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative
complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed
to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost
ground.

The lesson in education was vital to these young men, who,
within ten years, killed each other by scores in the act of testing
their college conclusions. Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he
had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual

training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive
of admitting two; but in life one could get along very
well without ideas, if one had only the social instinct. Dozens
of eminent statesmen were men of Lee's type, and maintained
themselves well enough in the legislature, but college was a
sharper test. The Virginian was weak in vice itself, though the
Bostonian was hardly a master of crime. The habits of neither
were good; both were apt to drink hard and to live low lives; but
the Bostonian suffered less than the Virginian. Commonly the
Bostonian could take some care of himself even in his worst stages,
while the Virginian became quarrelsome and dangerous. When
a Virginian had brooded a few days over an imaginary grief and
substantial whiskey, none of his Northern friends could be sure
that he might not be waiting, round the corner, with a knife or
pistol, to revenge insult by the dry light of delirium tremens; and
when things reached this condition, Lee had to exhaust his authority
over his own staff. Lee was a gentleman of the old school,
and, as every one knows, gentlemen of the old school drank almost
as much as gentlemen of the new school; but this was not
his trouble. He was sober even in the excessive violence of political
feeling in those years; he kept his temper and his friends
under control.

Adams liked the Virginians. No one was more obnoxious to
them, by name and prejudice; yet their friendship was unbroken
and even warm. At a moment when the immediate future posed
no problem in education so vital as the relative energy and endurance
of North and South, this momentary contact with Southern
character was a sort of education for its own sake; but this
was not all. No doubt the self-esteem of the Yankee, which
tended naturally to self-distrust, was flattered by gaining the
slow conviction that the Southerner, with his slave-owning limitations,
was as little fit to succeed in the struggle of modern life
as though he were still a maker of stone axes, living in caves, and
hunting the bos primigenius, and that every quality in which he

was strong, made him weaker; but Adams had begun to fear that
even in this respect one eighteenth-century type might not differ
deeply from another. Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian
of a century before; but Adams was himself a good deal
nearer the type of his great-grandfather than to that of a railway
superintendent. He was little more fit than the Virginians
to deal with a future America which showed no fancy for the past.
Already Northern society betrayed a preference for economists
over diplomats or soldiers—one might even call it a jealousy—
against which two eighteenth-century types had little chance to
live, and which they had in common to fear.

Nothing short of this curious sympathy could have brought
into close relations two young men so hostile as Roony Lee and
Henry Adams, but the chief difference between them as collegians
consisted only in their difference of scholarship: Lee was
a total failure; Adams a partial one. Both failed, but Lee felt
his failure more sensibly, so that he gladly seized the chance of
escape by accepting a commission offered him by General Winfield
Scott in the force then being organized against the Mormons.
He asked Adams to write his letter of acceptance, which flattered
Adams's vanity more than any Northern compliment could
do, because, in days of violent political bitterness, it showed a certain
amount of good temper. The diplomat felt his profession.

If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from
his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes,
wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom
what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not
want to be one in a hundred—one per cent of an education. He
regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had
value, and he wanted the whole of it. He got barely half of an
average. Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him
back to teach in his turn what no student naturally cared or
needed to know, he diverted some dreary hours of faculty-meetings
by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself

graded precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed
—mathematics—barring the few first scholars, failure was so
nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value,
and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an
accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education
failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician;
at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he
needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language,
and he never reached the alphabet.

Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing
from the ancient languages. Beyond some incoherent theories
of free-trade and protection, he got little from Political Economy.
He could not afterwards remember to have heard the name of
Karl Marx mentioned, or the title of "Capital." He was equally
ignorant of Auguste Comte. These were the two writers of his
time who most influenced its thought. The bit of practical teaching
he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in
Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged
his mind for a lifetime. The only teaching that appealed to his
imagination was a course of lectures by Louis Agassiz on the Glacial
Period and Palæontology, which had more influence on his
curiosity than the rest of the college instruction altogether. The
entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the
work of any four months in after life.

Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have
value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood,
not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which
had no bias at all. It would also have weakened the literary bias,
if Adams had been capable of finding other amusement, but the
climate kept him steady to desultory and useless reading, till he
had run through libraries of volumes which he forgot even to
their title-pages. Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned
to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English
composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as

in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition,
he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best,
warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of
his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of
their scholars' powers. Henry Adams himself held the opinion
that his instructors were very nearly right, and when he became
a professor in his turn, and made mortifying mistakes in ranking
his scholars, he still obstinately insisted that on the whole, he was
not far wrong. Student or professor, he accepted the negative
standard because it was the standard of the school.

He never knew what other students thought of it, or what they
thought they gained from it; nor would their opinion have much
affected his. From the first, he wanted to be done with it, and
stood watching vaguely for a path and a direction. The world
outside seemed large, but the paths that led into it were not many
and lay mostly through Boston, where he did not want to go.
As it happened, by pure chance, the first door of escape that
seemed to offer a hope led into Germany, and James Russell
Lowell opened it.

Lowell, on succeeding Longfellow as Professor of Belles-Lettres,
had duly gone to Germany, and had brought back whatever he
found to bring. The literary world then agreed that truth survived
in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold Renan,
Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the German
faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of coming
capitalism—its money-lenders, its bank directors, and its railway
magnates. Thackeray and Dickens followed Balzac in scratching
and biting the unfortunate middle class with savage ill-temper,
much as the middle class had scratched and bitten the
Church and Court for a hundred years before. The middle class
had the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the
satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed
that the Second Empire was a disgrace to France and a danger
to England, they turned to Germany because at that moment

Germany was neither economical nor military, and a hundred
years behind western Europe in the simplicity of its standard.
German thought, method, honesty, and even taste, became the,
standards of scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare
—Kant ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious
scholars were obliged to become German, for German thought
was revolutionizing criticism. Lowell had followed the rest, not
very enthusiastically, but with sufficient conviction, and invited
his scholars to join him. Adams was glad to accept the invitation,
rather for the sake of cultivating Lowell than Germany, but still
in perfect good faith. It was the first serious attempt he had
made to direct his own education, and he was sure of getting some
education out of it; not perhaps anything that he expected, but
at least a path.

Singularly circuitous and excessively wasteful of energy the
path proved to be, but the student could never see what other
was open to him. He could have done no better had he foreseen
every stage of his coming life, and he would probably have done
worse. The preliminary step was pure gain. James Russell
Lowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable
part of its universities, the habit of allowing students to read
with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and
used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal
contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older men ought to
flatter and please the young even when they altogether exaggerate
its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy's life. As
practical a New Englander as any, he leaned towards the Concord
faith rather than towards Boston where he properly belonged;
for Concord, in the dark days of 1856, glowed with pure
light. Adams approached it in much the same spirit as he would
have entered a Gothic Cathedral, for he well knew that the priests
regarded him as only a worm. To the Concord Church all Adamses
were minds of dust and emptiness, devoid of feeling, poetry or
imagination; little higher than the common scourings of State

Street; politicians of doubtful honesty; natures of narrow scope;
and already, at eighteen years old, Henry had begun to feel uncertainty
about so many matters more important than Adamses
that his mind rebelled against no discipline merely personal, and
he was ready to admit his unworthiness if only he might penetrate
the shrine. The influence of Harvard College was beginning
to have its effect. He was slipping away from fixed principles;
from Mount Vernon Street; from Quincy; from the eighteenth
century; and his first steps led toward Concord.

He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like
the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained
always an insect, or something much lower—a man. It was
surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps
—as Mr. Emerson justly said—it was so; in spite of the
long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back into
the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was himself
and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the banker; it
was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did not
lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to him, at
one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowell was
as little transcendental as Beacon Street. From him the boy
got no revolutionary thought whatever—objective or subjective
as they used to call it—but he got good-humored encouragement
to do what amused him, which consisted in passing two
years in Europe after finishing the four years of Cambridge.

The result seemed small in proportion to the effort, but it was
the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of
Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard
College influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could
trace, but he tended towards negation on his own account, as
one side of the New England mind had always done, and even
there he could never feel sure that Harvard college had more
than reflected a weakness. IN his opinion the was not
serious, but in truth hardly any Boston student took it seriously,

and none of them seemed sure that President Walker himself,
or President Felton after him, took it more seriously than the
students. For them all, the college offered chiefly advantages
vulgarly called social, rather than mental.

Unluckily for this particular boy, social advantages were his
only capital in life. Of money he had not much, of mind not more,
but he could be quite certain that, barring his own faults, his social
position would never be questioned. What he needed was a
career in which social position had value. Never in his life would
he have to explain who he was; never would he have need of acquaintance
to strengthen his social standing; but he needed greatly
some one to show him how to use the acquaintance he cared to
make. He made no acquaintance in college which proved to have
the smallest use in after life. All his Boston friends he knew before,
or would have known in any case, and contact of Bostonian
with Bostonian was the last education these young men needed.
Cordial and intimate as their college relations were, they all flew
off in different directions the moment they took their degrees.
Harvard College remained a tie, indeed, but a tie little stronger
than Beacon Street and not so strong as State Street. Strangers
might perhaps gain something from the college if they were hard
pressed for social connections. A student like H. H. Richardson,
who came from far away New Orleans, and had his career before
him to chase rather than to guide, might make valuable friendships
at college. Certainly Adams made no acquaintance there
that he valued in after life so much as Richardson, but still more
certainly the college relation had little to do with the later friendship.
Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together.
Adams would have attached himself to Richardson in any case,
as he attached himself to John LaFarge or Augustus St. Gaudens
or Clarence King or John Hay, none of whom were at Harvard
College. The valley of life grew more and more narrow with years,
and certain men with common tastes were bound to come together.
Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a

more equal footing with them had he been less ignorant, and had
he not thrown away ten years of early life in acquiring what he
might have acquired in one.

Socially or intellectually, the college was for him negative and
in some ways mischievous. The most tolerant man of the world
could not see good in the lower habits of the students, but the
vices were less harmful than the virtues. The habit of drinking
—though the mere recollection of it made him doubt his own
veracity, so fantastic it seemed in later life—may have done no
great or permanent harm; but the habit of looking at life as a
social relation—an affair of society—did no good. It cultivated
a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped
to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of
any profession—such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty
of profiting by the social defects of opponents—it would have
been education better worth having than mathematics or languages;
but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only
to make the college standard permanent through life. The Bostonian
educated at Harvard College remained a collegian, if he
stuck only to what the college gave him. If parents went on,
generation after generation, sending their children to Harvard College
for the sake of its social advantages, they perpetuated an
inferior social type, quite as ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success
in the next generation.

Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable,
and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the
mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those who
liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American nor European,
nor even wholly Yankee; his admirers were few, and his
critics many; perhaps his worst weakness was his self-criticism and
self-consciousness; but his ambitions, social or intellectual, were
not necessarily cheap even though they might be negative. Afraid
of serious risks, and still more afraid of personal ridicule, he seldom

made a great failure of life, and nearly always led a life more or
less worth living. So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not
succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement
or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition
which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of
the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian
supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.

The College Magazine printed his work, and the College Societies
listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers were
not; the audiences, too, listened in silence; but this was all the
encouragement any Harvard collegian had a reasonable hope to
receive; grave silence was a form of patience that meant possible
future acceptance; and Henry Adams went on writing. No one
cared enough to criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer
from reaching his own limits. He found that he could not be this
—or that—or the other; always precisely the things he wanted
to be. He had not wit or scope or force. Judges always ranked
him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges
were right. His work seemed to him thin, commonplace, feeble.
At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that he could not go
on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it, and he found
that he had very little to say at best. Much that he then wrote must
be still in existence in print or manuscript, though he never cared
to see it again, for he felt no doubt that it was in reality just what
he thought it. At best it showed only a feeling for form; an instinct
of exclusion. Nothing shocked—not even its weakness.

Inevitably an effort leads to an ambition—creates it—and
at that time the ambition of the literary student, which almost
took place of the regular prizes of scholarship, was that of being
chosen as the representative of his class—the Class Orator—
at the close of their course. This was political as well as literary
success, and precisely the sort of eighteenth-century combination
that fascinated an eighteenth-century boy. The idea lurked in
his mind, at first as a dream, in no way serious or even possible,

for he stood outside the number of what were known as popular
men. Year by year, his position seemed to improve, or perhaps
his rivals disappeared, until at last, to his own great astonishment,
he found himself a candidate. The habits of the college permitted
no active candidacy; he and his rivals had not a word to
say for or against themselves, and he was never even consulted
on the subject; he was not present at any of the proceedings, and
how it happened he never could quite divine, but it did happen,
that one evening on returning from Boston he received notice of
his election, after a very close contest, as Class Orator over the
head of the first scholar, who was undoubtedly a better orator
and a more popular man. In politics the success of the poorer
candidate is common enough, and Henry Adams was a fairly
trained politician, but he never understood how he managed to
defeat not only a more capable but a more popular rival.

To him the election seemed a miracle. This was no mockmodesty;
his head was as clear as ever it was in an indifferent
canvass, and he knew his rivals and their following as well as he
knew himself. What he did not know, even after four years of
education, was Harvard College. What he could never measure
was the bewildering impersonality of the men, who, at twenty
years old, seemed to set no value either on official or personal
standards. Here were nearly a hundred young men who had lived
together intimately during four of the most impressionable years
of life, and who, not only once but again and again, in different
ways, deliberately, seriously, dispassionately, chose as their representatives
precisely those of their companions who seemed least
to represent them. As far as these Orators and Marshals had any
position at all in a collegiate sense, it was that of indifference
to the college. Henry Adams never professed the smallest faith in
universities of any kind, either as boy or man, nor had he the
faintest admiration for the university graduate, either in Europe
or In America; as a collegian he was only known apart from his
fellows by his habit of standing outside the college; and yet the

singular fact remained that this commonplace body of young men
chose him repeatedly to express his and their commonplaces.
Secretly, of course, the successful candidate flattered himself—
and them—with the hope that they might perhaps not be so
commonplace as they thought themselves; but this was only
another proof that all were identical. They saw in him a representative
—the kind of representative they wanted—and
he saw in them the most formidable array of judges he could ever
meet, like so many mirrors of himself, an infinite reflection of his
own shortcomings.

All the same, the choice was flattering; so flattering that it
actually shocked his vanity; and would have shocked it more, if
possible, had he known that it was to be the only flattery of the
sort he was ever to receive. The function of Class Day was, in the
eyes of nine-tenths of the students, altogether the most important
of the college, and the figure of the Orator was the most conspicuous
in the function. Unlike the Orators at regular Commencements,
the Class Day Orator stood alone, or had only the Poet
for rival. Crowded into the large church, the students, their
families, friends, aunts, uncles and chaperones, attended all the
girls of sixteen or twenty who wanted to show their summer
dresses or fresh complexions, and there, for an hour or two, in a
heat that might have melted bronze, they listened to an Orator
and a Poet in clergyman's gowns, reciting such platitudes as their
own experience and their mild censors permitted them to utter.
What Henry Adams said in his Class Oration of 1858 he soon forgot
to the last word, nor had it the least value for education; but
he naturally remembered what was said of it. He remembered
especially one of his eminent uncles or relations remarking that,
as the work of so young a man, the oration was singularly wanting
in enthusiasm. The young man—always in search of education
—asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this absence of
enthusiasm was a defect or a merit, since, in either case, it was all
that Harvard College taught, and all that the hundred young

men, whom he was trying to represent, expressed. Another comment
threw more light on the effect of the college education. One
of the elderly gentlemen noticed the orator's "perfect self-possession."
Self-possession indeed! If Harvard College gave nothing
else, it gave calm. For four years each student had been
obliged to figure daily before dozens of young men who knew
each other to the last fibre. One had done little but read papers
to Societies, or act comedy in the Hasty Pudding, not to speak of
all sorts of regular exercises, and no audience in future life would
ever be so intimately and terribly intelligent as these. Threefourths
of the graduates would rather have addressed the Council
of Trent or the British Parliament than have acted Sir Anthony
Absolute or Dr. Ollapod before a gala audience of the
Hasty Pudding. Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard
College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so
that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms
of terror before the public which often overcame the graduates
of European universities. Whether this was, or was not, education,
Henry Adams never knew. He was ready to stand up before
any audience in America or Europe, with nerves rather
steadier for the excitement, but whether he should ever have anything
to say, remained to be proved. As yet he knew nothing.
Education had not begun.