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tions to a bewitching pair of eyes, or a pretty foot. To prolong our assimilation, we might further remark, that "unhappy matches” are as often consummated in thus hastily making choice of a profession, as in that still more delicate duty of wife choosing. The sole remedy in both cases is divorce.

There are some among us who will have no trouble in selecting a profession, but whom nature, taste, and education seemed to have destined for a particular line of effort. To such we have nothing to say, except to congratulate them upon their good fortune, and bid them a hearty God speed, in their prospective career of success and usefulness. But to most of us the highway of life is not so well defined. There are "lions in the path" of almost every calling, over which the mind's eye wanders. Difficulties, dangers, doubts, cling tenaciously about every ambition which we hope to gratify, and mistrust of self mingles with all our dreams. And yet the stern truth that we must do something, that we must, ere long, grapple with the stubborn difficulties of life, in some avenue of effort, is ever before us, and will not "down at our bidding." Few of us but have felt anxiety now and then at the thought that college life is almost gone, and that the scenes, the associations, and the peculiar pleasures, now so dear to us, will be swept almost from our memories, by unsparing Time. Our names, it is true, will be laid away triennially in the College archives, and some antiquarian friend may occasionally turn to "our class" to count the dead and revive his recollection of the living, as his eye rests for a moment upon the page which records all that is known of us. But it may nevertheless be claimed as a general rule, that our sheep-skins are but passports, so far as college is concerned, to oblivion; and that the places which now know us, shall know us no more forever. The thought comes sadly over us at times as we pass South Middle-that Patriarch of College brick and mortar-and our eye falls upon the stone thresholds, worn almost to the ground by the footsteps of an hundred college generations. How few of those who, in years long gone, have crossed and recrossed those old stones-whose forms were familiar in the door-ways, and whose songs have echoed along its passages, are now known of, or cared for, by the present occupants of their very rooms! Our own fate also, has again and again forced itself upon our reflection, as we have asked a graduate of a dozen or fifteen years' standing, something in regard to a classmate or cotemporary, and have been told, that he "believed there was such an individual in College with him," but he kne v nothing of him now. But we wander sadly.

There are three things which we should be sure of, before we decide "what to do when we graduate." First, of course, we must feel that we have the capacity requisite to a reasonable degree of success in the proposed calling. And it is here that many make their first mistake, and, strange to say, very often from an excessive self-distrust. Modesty is doubtless a cardinal virtue, but it is nevertheless true, that a man must begin by asserting for himself, what, in the end, he hopes to hear others asserting for him. Nowhere, more than in choosing a profession is the truth of Shakspeare's

"Our doubts are traitors,

Which make us loose the good we else might win,

By fearing to attempt,"

made manifest.

It is not the least of the benefits of a College course, that it frees us from an overweening self-confidence, and convinces us that whatever acquirements we may have made, there are still others to be made, furnishing an exhaustless field for future effort. And yet, we should not forget that we are as well off as other men, nor fear to enter the lists of any honorable warfare.

Secondly, we should consult carefully our tastes and predilections, and not yield to a whim or a caprice, what is due only to a thorough and complete knowledge of a fixed sentiment. There are many men at the bar who ought to be in the pulpit; and there are as many in the pulpit, who should be in the counting-room. A taste for the study of medicine is one so peculiar in its nature that we are less liable to error in according to it its proper influence, than in the case of almost any other profession. Too many young men select the law as their calling, merely because their taste for speaking leads them to it. But veterans in the profession tell us that oratory is but an ornament of the lawyer-a most desirable, but, by no means, an indispensable accomplishment, in his character. The lawyer must be such in information, and learning, and mind; as well as in grace of speech, and fertility of imagination. The theatre of his duty is not always in public, and amid the plaudits of admiring friends, but oftener in the quiet of his office, absorbed in all important thought. The bar and the forum can yield him permanent success, only as the discipline of the closet has been genuine and thorough.

Thirdly, a man must have courage, moral resolution, and the determination to exert himself in whatever department of effort he engages. Much has been said and written, on the importance of industry, and the necessity of application. We don't propose to add a single

word to the familiar homilies on these subjects, which lose much of their just influence by the stereotyped manner in which, from early boyhood, they have been periodically presented to us. But there is another consideration not so frequently dwelt upon, which we may venture to notice. This is, the value of a hopeful, buoyant, and cheerful spirit; associated with industry, and softening the hard realities of life, by furnishing a perennial spring of personal content and happiness. That power which will enable us to rise from among difficulties by triumphing separately over each, and thus, by a slow and constant progress, to build for ourselves a character, substantial in its foundations, and graceful in its symmetry; is more sublime than that, which, by a sort of inspiration, lifts us at once to a brilliant, but often, a transient eminence. A light heart and an elastic spirit, if joined with intelligent effort and a constant courage, must, at last, bear their possessor to genuine success in any profession which he embraces.

"In the reproof of chance

Lies the true proof of men."

Many go forth every year from the cloister life of College to the sterner duties of professional effort, who are but poorly fitted for any of the callings we have named. One reason of this is, we think, that young men do not decide sooner "what they will do." We are aware that there are two theories on this subject: the one maintaining that college should do for the mind what exercise does for the body, that it should discipline it for exertion in any, rather than in a particular department; the other, asserting that there should be a certain degree of discrimination in all the training of a College course. We have neither the time nor the disposition to enter, at length, into the comparative merits of these conflicting theories. But we venture the opinion, that if the young men of our Universities could sooner contemplate the profession for which they found themselves best fitted, and could direct their reading, writing, and thinking accordingly, it would add much to the usefulness of our four years at College.

There is much food for thought in the question, so familiar to all of us, "What are you going to do when you graduate?" It is a serious question doubtless, but it need not be a sad one. There is a place

for every man in the world, and there are eminences along the roadside of life, which, with patient courage, all of us may reach. Shall we not then, as we separate upon the threshold of life, and sunder the ties which have bound us here, go hopefully?

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Alma mater floreat,

Que nos educavit,
Caros et commilitones,

Dissitas in regiones,

Sparsos, congregavit.

Bloom beloved Mother Yale,
Who art educating

Us, a firm-cemented band,

From every near and distant land,
Hither congregating.

The "In Memoriam" of Tennyson.

THERE is among us to-day a certain class of critics, many of them rhymers, and as such not unknown to fame, but who sometimes assume the tone of satirists. The principal theme of their spicy satires,

is the age in which they have the misfortune to be born.

The nineteenth century, with its strange exciting toil, its widespread schemes of Christian benevolence, and its strange fearful and multiform crimes; this age, great in every aspect, whether it be in those problems of political economy and state policy, which it is solv ing in the scientific researches of its scholars, or even in the earnest life-long toil of its millions of men, at this their sickly sneers are directed. They are nominally the friends of genius, but in reality its worst foes. They have a poetic taste, impure to a degree, and yet continually forcing itself upon our notice. They would wish to have lived in the golden days of Rome or in the noble age of chivalry, and would that they had; then perhaps they might have swelled the crowd of sweaty plebeians who shouted at the sight of the great Julius, or perhaps they might have been scullions in the kitchens of some feudal baron. Now they are but parasites living on the surface of society, and not individual units in the great heaving mass of modern life. It is to these we are disposed to attribute the morbid poetic tone of the day, that taste which infects principally the young, which deals in pretty tropes and flashy similes, with here and there a passionate appeal to the beautiful, the ideal, the stars, ocean etc., ad infinitum. This taste, to be sure, admires beauty, and knowledge, too, because knowledge is beautiful, but it forgets entirely, that

"Beauty, Good and Knowledge, are three sisters
That dote upon each other, friends to man,

Living together under the same roof

And never can be sundered without tears."

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