Edwin P. Lehman

A NOTE ON THE ACADEMIC LIFE

The academic life, like the bricklayers life, must be lived according to the lights of the individual. But there are in each of these, as in the life of a person of any grade or calling, certain elements that characterize it. And those that characterize the academic life have a charm and richness traditional in speech and literature. Take, for instance, a professor of the classics. He is usually a personable man, with a mellow taste in books, music, pictures, fabrics and furniture, ready with a jest or a sober comment. He is a scholar of the first water, able to trace his roots and his terminations, a familiar of the heroes of his literature as well as of those creatures that burrow in the depths of libraries beneath the clear surface waters in which the rest of us splash. He is a teacher in the true sense, the man