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This last year, my second year at Radcliffe, I studied English Composition, the English Bible from a literary rather than a religious point of view, the Governments of America and Europe, the Odes of Horace, and Latin Comedy. The class in Composition has, I think, been the pleasantest. It met in the afternoon and was very lively. The lectures in that course are always interesting, vivacious, witty; for the instructor, Mr. Copeland, more than any one I know, brings before you literature in all its original freshness and power. For one short hour you are permitted to drink in the all-time beauty of the old masters without definition, needless interpretation or exposition. You revel in their fine thoughts. You enjoy with all your soul the sweet thunder of the Old Testament, forgetting the existence of Jahveh and Elohim; and you go home feeling that you have had "a glimpse of that perfection in which spirit and form dwell in immortal harmony; truth and beauty bearing a new growth on the ancient stem of time."

BUT college is not the universal Athens I thought it was. There one does not meet the great and the wise face to face; one does not even feel their living touch. They are there, it is true; but they seem mummified. We must extract them from the crannied wall of learning and dissect and analyze them before we can be sure that we have a Shakespeare and an Isaiah, or only a clever imitation. Scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. It is possible to know a flower, root and stem and all, and all the processes of growth, and yet to have no appreciation of the flower fresh bathed in heaven's dew. Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations?" They fly hither and thither in the heaven of my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings.

There are times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost. It is impossible, I think, to read in one day four or five different books in different languages and treating of widely different subjects and not lose sight of the very ends for which one reads -- mental stimulus and enrichment. When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of choice bric-à-brac for which there is very little use. At the present moment my mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to put it in order. Whenever I enter the region that was the kingdom of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china-shop. A thousand odds and ends of knowledge come crashing about my head, and when I try to escape them, theme-goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish -- oh, may I be forgiven! -- that I might smash the idols I came to worship.

THE examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until, like Bob Acres, I feel my courage oozing out at my finger-ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formulæ and indigestible dates -- unpalatable diets -- until you wish that books and science and you were buried in the depths of the sea. At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favored being indeed if you feel prepared and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often, however, that your trumpet-call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that, just at the moment when you most need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch. "Give a brief account of Huss and his work." Huss? Who was he, and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top -- you saw it there the other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge -- revolutions, schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss -- where is he? You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In desperation you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a corner is your man, serenely brooding on his own private thought, unconscious of the catastrophe which he has brought upon you! Just then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without the consent of the questioned.