" That wisdom the west, as I have already intimated, has not yet
learned. Such a scene as I witnessed a little time ago in the amphitheatre
of the Sorbonne, a scene typical of what occurs many times a day there, is
not yet to be seen in the valley. I saw that hall filled in the early
afternoon with an audience markedly masculine, listening to a lecture on
early Greek life, interspersed with readings from the Homeric epics. I
cannot visualize, much as I could wish to, a like scene in the Mississippi
Valley, except in the atmosphere of a woman's club, or at an assembly on
the shore of the lake Chautauqua, which I have described in the narrative
of the "sowing of the leaden plates," where men and women are for a little
time shut away from their normal occupations in a fenced or walled town;
or in a university where attendance upon the lecture is required for a
degree. I cannot visualize it even with such a charming and amphionic
lecturer as the great scholar who gave the lecture on Greece [Footnote:
Dean Croiset.
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