But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate, --since even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never yet fully elucidated,--yet their collective influence both on Harvard University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country, and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and the North American Review ; and culminated later in the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence.
