Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, no. 41, March, 1861 | Page 8

is exhausted,--it is only touched upon. He learns to teach himself.
Far different is the mental training thus acquired from that gained in the same amount of time spent in mere reading. Thought is stimulated to a far greater degree. The lecture-room becomes a laboratory, where the mind of the hearer, in immediate contact with that of a man mature in the ways of study, of one whose whole life seems to have prepared him for the present hour, assimilates to itself more than knowledge. The lecturer gives what no books can give, his own force to impel his own words. His mind is ever active while he speaks. The hearer feels its workings, and his own is stirred into action by the contact. It is not given to all to enjoy the conversation and intercourse of the master-minds of the age: in the lecture-room they speak to us immediately; we feel the current of their life-blood; it pulsates through all they say.
That seeming exceptions may occur, as in the case of professors who year after year deliver the same written course, can have no weight against the system. The tone and gesture, the very look, must animate the whole;--and these very written lectures, read and delivered so often, are no dead stalk, but a living stem, which puts forth new leaves and blossoms every spring.
Nor is the hearer himself without his corresponding influence. His attention and eager desire for knowledge stimulate new thought in the speaker day by day, hour by hour; and many a German scholar must have felt with Friedrich August Wolf, when he says,--"I am one who has been long accustomed to the gentle charm which lies in the momentaneous unfolding of thought in the presence of attentive hearers, to that living reaction softly felt by the teacher, whereby a perennial mental harmony is awakened in his soul, which far surpasses the labors in the study, before blank walls and the feelingless paper."
THE STUDIES.
The first entrance into a German auditorium or _H?rsaal_, as the lecture-rooms in the universities are called, will show much that is characteristic. But little care is bestowed on the decoration of the apartment. Whatever aesthetic culture the nation may have, it finds little manifestation in the things of daily life, and elegance seems little less than banished from the precincts of the learned world. The academic halls present to the view nothing but dingy walls, rough floors coated with the dust and mud of days or weeks, and, winter and summer, the huge porcelain stove in one corner,--that immovable article of cheerless German furniture, where wood is put in by the pound, and no bright glow ever discloses the presence of that warmest friend of man, a good fire. For the students there are coarse, long wooden desks and benches, with places all numbered, cut up and disfigured to an extent which will soon convince one that whittling is not a trait of American destructiveness exclusively. Here are carved names and intertwined lettering, arabesque masterpieces of penknife-ingenuity, with a general preponderance of feminine appellatives, bold incisures, at times, of some worthy professor in profile,--the whole besmutched with ink, and dotted with countless punctures, the result of the sharp spike with which every student's ink-horn is armed, that he may steady it upon the slanting board. The preceding lecture ended when the university-clock struck the hour; the next should begin within ten or fifteen minutes. One by one the students drop in and take their places,--high and low, rich and poor, all on the same straight-backed pine benches. The days fire over, even in title-loving Germany, though not long since, when the young counts and barons sat foremost, on a privileged, raised, and cushioned seat, and were addressed by their title.
As the hearers thus assemble, they present a motley appearance,--being, in the larger cities especially, from all lands, all ranks of society, and of every age. Side by side with the young freshman in his first semester, the _Fat Fox_, as he is called, who has just made a leap from the strict discipline of the gymnasium to the unbounded freedom of the university, will be a gray-haired man, to whom the academic title of Juvenis Studiosus will no longer apply. Here sits, with his gaudy watch-guard, the colors of his corps, one of those students by profession who have been inscribed year after year so long that they have acquired the name of Bemossed Heads. Were his scientific attainments measured by his capacities for beer-drinking and sword-slashing, he would long ago have been dubbed a Doctor in all the faculties. He hears a lecture now and then for form's sake, though it is rather an unusual thing for him. By his side, but retiring and earnest, may be one of the younger professors,