If, since the world stood, there have been composed and sent off by mail or private postmen 1,600,378 anonymous letters derogatory of character, then 1,600,378 were vicious and damnable. If you are compelled to choose between writing a letter with false signature vitriolic of any man's integrity or any woman's honor on the one hand, and the writing a letter with a red-hot nail dipped in adder's poison on a sheet woven of leper scales, choose the latter. It were healthier, nobler, and could better endure the test of man's review and God's scrutiny.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
BRAWN OR BRAIN.
Governor Wiseman (our oracular friend who talked in the style of an oration) was with us this evening at the tea-table, and we were mentioning the fact that about thirty colleges last summer in the United States contested for the championship in boat-racing. About two hundred thousand young ladies could not sleep nights, so anxious were they to know whether Yale or Williams would be the winner. The newspapers gave three and four columns to the particulars, the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair, enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of Criticism for the other.
For the most part, we sympathized with the boys, and confess that at our hotel we kept careful watch of the bulletin to see whose boat came in ahead. We are disposed to applaud anything that will give our young men muscular development. Students have such a tendency to lounge, and mope, and chew, and eat almond-nuts at midnight, and read novels after they go to bed, the candlestick set up on Webster's dictionary or the Bible, that we prize anything that makes them cautious about their health, as they must be if they would enter the list of contestants. How many of our country boys enter the freshman class of college in robust health, which lasts them about a twelvemonth; then in the sophomore they lose their liver; in the junior they lose their stomach; in the senior they lose their back bone; graduating skeletons, more fit for an anatomical museum than the bar or pulpit.
"Midnight oil," so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene. Where hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred. Kirk White, while at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten o'clock that night instead of three o'clock the next morning, he would have been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all collegians. Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the religion bilious. We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong stomach. Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric juices. Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.
But, after all, there was something wrong about those summer boat-races. A student with a stout arm, and great girth, and full chest, and nothing else, is not at all admirable. Mind and body need to be driven tandem, the body for the wheel horse and the intellect the leader. We want what is now proposed in some directions—a grand collegiate literary race. Let the mental contest be on the same week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt. About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow, oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters to swell the river of knowledge on which they row. Right foot on right rib of the boat, and left foot on the left rib—bend into it, my hearties, bend!—and our craft come out four lengths ahead.
Give the brain a chance as well as the arm. Do not let the animal eat up the soul. Let the body be the well-fashioned hulk, and the mind the white sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on toward the harbor of glorious achievement. When that boat starts, we want to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with sky-rockets.
"By the way," I said, "Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a cheering tendency? Governor, do you ever have the blues?"