Theodore Roosevelt | Page 9

which greatly helped him. Incidentally, he says that from the Latin
names of the birds he made his first acquaintance with that language.
While Mr. Roosevelt attended to his duties in Vienna the younger
children were placed in the family of Herr Minckwitz, a Government
official at Dresden. There, Theodore, "in spite of himself," learned a
good deal of German, and he never forgot his pleasant life among the
Saxons in the days be fore the virus of Prussian barbarism had poisoned
all the non-Prussian Germans. Minckwitz had been a Liberal in the
Revolution of 1848, a fact which added to Theodore's interest in him.
On getting home, Theodore, who was fifteen years old, set to work
seriously to fit himself to enter Harvard College. Up to this time his
education had been unmethodical, leaving him behind his fellows in
some subjects and far ahead of them in others. He had the good fortune
now to secure as a tutor Mr. Arthur H. Cutler, for many years head of
the Cutler Preparatory School in New York City, thanks to whose
excellent training he was able to enter college in 1876. During these
years of preparation Theodore's health steadily improved. He had a gun
and was an ardent sportsman, the incentive of adding specimens to his
collection of birds and animals outweighing the mere sport of slaughter.
At Oyster Bay, where his father first leased a house in 1874, he spent
much of his time on the water, but he deemed sailing rather lazy and
unexciting, compared with rowing. He enjoyed taking his row-boat out
into the Sound, and, if a high headwind was blowing, or the sea ran in
whitecaps, so much the better. He was now able to share in all of the
athletic pastimes of his companions, although, so far as I know, he
never indulged in baseball, the commonest game of all.
When he entered Harvard as a Freshman in 1876, that institution was
passing through its transition from college to university, which had
begun when Charles W. Eliot became its President seven years before.
In spite of vehement assaults, the Great Educator pushed on his reform
slowly but resistlessly. He needed to train not only the public but many
members, perhaps a majority, of his faculty. Young Roosevelt found a
body of eight hundred undergraduates, the largest number up to that

time. While the Elective System had been introduced in the upper
classes, Freshmen and Sophomores were still required to take the
courses prescribed for them.
To one who looks back, after forty years, on the Harvard of that time
there was much about it, the loss of which must be regretted. Limited in
many directions it was, no doubt, but its very limitations made for
friendship and for that sense of intimate mutual, relationship, out of
which springs mutual affection. You belonged to Harvard, and she to
you. That she was small, compared with her later magnitude, no more
lessened your love for her, than your love for your own mother could
be increased were she suddenly to become a giantess. The
undergraduate community was not exactly a large family, but it was,
nevertheless, restricted enough not only for a fellow to know at least by
sight all of his classmates, but also to have some knowledge of what
was going on in other classes as well as in the College as a whole.
Academic fame, too, had a better chance then than it has now. There
were eight or ten professors, whom most of the fellows knew by sight,
and all by reputation; now, however, I meet intelligent students who
have never heard even the name of the head of some department who is
famous throughout the world among his colleagues, but whose courses
that student has never taken.
In spite of the simplicity and the homelikeness of the Harvard with
eight hundred undergraduates, however, it was large enough to afford
the opportunity of meeting men of many different tastes and men from
all parts of the country. So it gave free play to the development of
individual talents, and its standard of scholarship was already
sufficiently high to ensure the excellence of the best scholars it trained.
One quality which we probably took little note of, although it must
have affected us all, sprang from the fact that Harvard was still a
crescent institution; she was in the full vigor of growth, of expansion,
of increase, and we shared insensibly from being connected with that
growth. In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to this crescent
spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet
of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into
pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous

disenchantment sicklied o'er the