Various long causeways over the wide expanse of Charles River where it
spreads out to form the Back Bay, and passing in front of the newly
filled-in West End, lead from Boston to the academic city of
Cambridge. This populous city, best known from Harvard University, is
beautifully situated on a plain, has important manufacturing
industries, handsome public buildings, and a large number of elegant
private residences in spacious grounds ornamented with fine old trees,
shrubbery and flower-gardens. Cambridge was settled soon after Boston,
as the "Newe Towne," in 1630. Its Common contains the venerable
"Washington Elm," over three hundred years old, under which, after the
battle of Bunker Hill, General Washington assumed command, July 3,
1775, of the American army besieging Boston. Opposite the southern
end of the Common are old Christ Church, built of materials sent out
from England, and the First Parish Church, with a Gothic steeple,
having between them the burying-ground of the old town. Of these,
Oliver Wendell Holmes has written:
"Like Sentinel and Nun they keep
Their vigil on the green;
One seems to guard and one to weep
The dead that lie between."
In the suburbs of Cambridge, adjoining Charles River, is Boston's
chief place of interment, Mount Auburn Cemetery, a romantic enclosure
of hill and vale, covering one hundred and twenty-five acres, with a
grand development of tombs and landscape. The tower upon the summit of
the Mount gives a beautiful outlook over the winding Charles River
valley and the Brookline, Brighton and West Roxbury villa and park
districts beyond, the distant view being closed by the charming Blue
Hills of Milton. In this cemetery are interred many of the famous men
of Massachusetts, including Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Everett,
Sumner, Motley, Choate, Quincy, Agassiz and Prescott.
The great Cambridge institution, however, is Harvard University, the
oldest, largest and wealthiest seat of learning in America. In 1636
the Massachusetts Legislature founded a school at the "Newe Towne,"
voting £400 for the purpose, and in 1638 John Harvard, who had been
for a short time a pastor in Charlestown, died at the age of
thirty-one, and left to this school his library of two hundred and
sixty volumes and half his estate, valued at about £800. Then the
school was made a college and named Harvard, and the town was called
Cambridge by the Legislature. The monument of the youthful patron is
in Charlestown, and, cast in heroic bronze, he now sits in a capacious
chair in front of the Harvard Memorial Hall. This great University far
antedates its rival Yale at New Haven, for its first class was
graduated in 1642, and in 1650 "The President and Fellows of Harvard
College" were incorporated. In fact, Harvard was founded only ninety
years later than the great College of English Cambridge--Emmanuel.
John Harvard and Henry Dunster, who was the first President of
Harvard, and several other prominent Boston colonists, had been
students at Emmanuel, and thus from the older Puritan foundation came
the younger, and it was natural to adopt for the town the name of the
English University city. The first New England printing-press was set
up in 1639 at Cambridge, and in the Riverside Press and the University
Press of to-day it is succeeded by two renowned book-making
establishments. Closely allied, in a scientific way, has also been at
Cambridgeport for many years the works of Alvan Clark & Co., the noted
makers of telescope lenses.
Harvard University has sent out many thousands of famous graduates,
and Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell have been members of its faculty. It
is liberally endowed, has ample grounds, and there are over sixty
buildings devoted to the purposes of the University, the annual
disbursements exceeding $1,000,000. Its government was formerly a
strictly religious organization, most of the graduates becoming
clergymen, but it was recently secularized so that no denominational
religion is now insisted upon, and comparatively few graduates enter
the pulpit. There are schools of law, medicine, dentistry, divinity,
agriculture, the arts and sciences, all the learned professions being
provided for, but everything is elective. In the various departments
there are more than four thousand students, taught by about four
hundred professors and instructors. It has some seven hundred acres of
land, interest-bearing endowments exceeding $8,000,000, receives,
besides, annual gifts sometimes reaching $400,000, and has a library
of five hundred thousand volumes and almost as many pamphlets. Much
attention is given outdoor sports and athletic training, Harvard
having the finest gymnasium in the country, and an athletic field of
twenty acres south of the river. Among the graduates have been two
Presidents, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams; also his
grandson, Charles Francis Adams, William Ellery Channing, Edward
Everett, George Bancroft, Jared Sparks, William H. Prescott, Emerson,
Holmes, Sumner, Lowell, Motley and Thoreau.
The University buildings are in the centre of the old city, enclosing
two large quadrangles shaded by elms. Massachusetts Hall, the oldest
building now standing, dates from 1720, Harvard Hall from 1766, and
University Hall from 1815. The most elaborate modern building is the
Memorial Hall, a splendid structure of brick and Nova Scotia stone,
three hundred and ten feet long, having a cloister at one end and a
massive tower at the other. This was erected in memory of the Harvard
graduates who fell in the Civil War; and in the grand Vestibule which
crosses the building like a transept, having a marble floor and rich
vaulted ceiling of ash, and fine windows through which pours a
mellowed light, there are tablets set in the arcaded sides bearing the
names of the dead. Upon one side of this impressive Vestibule is the
spacious Saunders Theatre, used for the commencements and public
services, having as an adornment the statue of Josiah Quincy, a
President of the College and long the Mayor of Boston. Upon the other
side of the Vestibule is the college Great Hall, one hundred and
sixty-four feet long and eighty feet high, with a splendid roof of
open timber-work and magnificent windows. This is the refectory where
a thousand students can dine, and in it centre the most hallowed
memories of Harvard, portraits and busts of the distinguished
graduates and benefactors adorning it, with the great western window
in the afternoon throwing a flood of rich sunlight over the scene.
Harvard has been patterned much after the original Cambridge, thus
adding to the English vogue of many things seen about Boston. When
Charles Dilke visited America he wrote of Harvard, "Our English
Universities have not about them the classic repose, the air of study,
which belongs to Cambridge, Massachusetts; our Cambridge comes nearest
to her daughter-town, but even the English Cambridge has a breathing
street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England
is one great academic grove, buried in a philosophic calm, which our
universities cannot rival as long as men resort to them for other
purposes than work." The people at Boston told Dilke, when he was
here, that they spoke "the English of Elizabeth," and they heartily
congratulated him at the same time upon using what they said was "very
good English for an Englishman."
Adjoining Cambridge Common is Radcliffe College, for women, named in
honor of the English Lady Anne Radcliffe, afterwards Lady Moulson, the
first woman giving a scholarship to Harvard (in 1640). Some four
hundred women receive instruction here from Harvard professors, and
the graduates are granted the college degrees. Near by, in Brattle
Street, is the Craigie House, dating from 1759, which was Washington's
headquarters in 1775-6, and later, for nearly a half century, was the
home of Henry W. Longfellow, until he died in 1882. Longfellow was for
twenty years Professor of Modern Languages in Harvard, being succeeded
in 1854 by James Russell Lowell, whose home of Elmwood, an old
colonial house, is farther out Brattle Street. Lowell was born in
Cambridge in 1819, dying in 1891. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in
Cambridge in 1809, and being a skillful physician as well as a
_litterateur_, he was Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard
from 1847 till 1882. He resided in Boston on Beacon Street, dying in
1894. Margaret Fuller, the noted transcendentalist, was born in
Cambridge in 1810, and after writing several books, and achieving fame
as a linguist and conversationalist, she went abroad, marrying the
Marquis d'Ossoli in Rome, and returning to New York, they were both
lost by shipwreck at Fire Island in 1850.