advantage to Harvard College.  The recent upheaval in religious thought had secured toleration and made possible that free and even audacious interchange of ideas without which a literary atmosphere is impossible.  From these, or from whatever causes, it happened that the old Harvard scholarship had an elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry erudition of the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there were men in the professors’ chairs who were no less efficient as teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and men of the world.  In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 there were graduated from Harvard College Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their residence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Concord, which was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston as Cambridge was.  In 1836, when Longfellow became professor of modern languages at Harvard, Sumner was lecturing in the Law School.  The following year—­in which Thoreau took his bachelor’s degree—­witnessed the delivery of Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the American Scholar in the college chapel, and Wendell Phillips’s speech on the Murder of Lovejoy in Faneuil Hall.  Lowell, whose description of the impression produced by the former of these famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, was an under-graduate at the time.  He took his degree in 1838, and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern languages.  Holmes had been chosen in 1847 professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School—­a position which he held until 1882.  The historians, Prescott and Bancroft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively.  The former’s first important publication, Ferdinand and Isabella, appeared in 1837.  Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 1822-23, and the initial volume of his History of the United States was issued in 1835.  Another of the Massachusetts school of historical writers, Francis Parkman, took his first degree at Harvard in 1844.  Cambridge was still hardly more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such as Lowell described it in his article, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, originally contributed to Putnam’s Monthly in 1853, and afterward reprinted in his Fireside Travels, 1864.  The situation of a university scholar in old Cambridge was thus an almost ideal one.  Within easy reach of a great city, with its literary and social clubs, its theaters, lecture courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc., he yet lived withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston Statehouse looming distantly across the meadows where the Charles laid its “steel blue sickle” upon the variegated, plush-like ground of the wide marsh.  There was thus, at all times during the quarter of a century embraced between 1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about