Chapter VI: A Dream of Darkness 221 (3)

Being a visitor, and in the Squire's pew, you are naturally an object of considerable attention to the girls about your age, as well as to a great many fat old ladies in iron spectacles, who mortify you excessively by patting you under the chin after church; and insist upon mistaking you for Frank; and force upon you very dry cookies spiced with caraway seeds.

You keep somewhat shy of the young ladies, as they are rather stout for your notions of beauty, and wear thick calf-skin boots. They compare very poorly with Jenny. Jenny, you think, would be above eating gingerbread between service. None of them, you imagine, ever read "Thaddeus of Warsaw," or ever used a colored glass seal with a Cupid and a dart upon it. You are quite certain they never did, or they could not surely wear such dowdy gowns, and suck their thumbs as they do!

The farmers you have a high respect for,--particularly for one weazen-faced old gentleman in a brown surtout, who brings his whip into church with him, who sings in a very strong voice, and who drives a span of gray colts. You think, however, that he has got rather a stout wife; and from the way he humors her in stopping to talk with two or three other fat women, before setting off for home, (though he seems a little fidgety,) you naively think that he has a high regard for her opinion. Another townsman who attracts your notice is a stout old deacon, who, before entering, always steps around the corner of the church, and puts his hat upon the ground, to adjust his wig in a quiet way. He then marches up the broad aisle in a stately manner, and plants his hat and a big pair of buckskin mittens on the little table under the desk. When he is fairly seated in his corner of the pew, with his elbow upon the top rail,--almost the only man who can comfortably reach it,--you observe that he spreads his brawny fingers over his scalp in an exceedingly cautious manner; and you innocently think again that it is very hypocritical in a deacon to be pretending to lean upon his hand when he is only keeping his wig straight.

After the morning service they have an "hour's intermission," as the preacher calls it; during which the old men gather on a sunny side of the building, and, after shaking hands all around, and asking after the "folks" at home, they enjoy a quiet talk about the crops. One man, for instance, with a twist in his nose, would say, "It's raether a growin' season;" and another would reply, "Tolerable, but potatoes is feelin' the wet badly." The stout deacon approves this opinion, and confirms it by blowing his nose very powerfully.

Two or three of the more worldly-minded ones will perhaps stroll over to a neighbor's barnyard, and take a look at his young stock, and talk of prices, and whittle a little; and very likely some two of them will make a conditional "swop" of "three likely ye'rlings" for a pair of "two-year-olds."

The youngsters are fond of getting out into the graveyard, and comparing jackknives, or talking about the schoolmaster or the menagerie, or, it may be, of some prospective "travel" in the fall,--either to town, or perhaps to the "sea-shore."

Afternoon service hangs heavily; and the tall chorister is by no means so blithe, or so majestic in the toss of his head, as in the morning. A boy in the next box tries to provoke you into familiarity by dropping pellets of gingerbread through the bars of the pew; but as you are not accustomed to that way of making acquaintance, you decline all overtures.

After the service is finished, the wagons, that have been disposed on either side of the road, are drawn up before the door. The old Squire meantime is sure to have a little chat with the parson before he leaves; in the course of which the parson takes occasion to say that his wife is a little ailing,--"a slight touch," he thinks, "of the rheumatiz." One of the children too has been troubled with the "summer complaint" for a day or two; but he thinks that a dose of catnip, under Providence, will effect a cure. The younger and unmarried men, with red wagons flaming upon bright yellow wheels, make great efforts to drive off in the van; and they spin frightfully near some of the fat, sour-faced women, who remark in a quiet, but not very Christian tone, that they "fear the elder's sermon hasn't done the young bucks much good." It is much to be feared in truth that it has not.

In ten minutes the old church is thoroughly deserted; the neighbor who keeps the key has locked up for another week the creaking door; and nothing of the service remains within except--Dr. Dwight's Version,--the long music-books,--crumbs of gingerbread, and refuse stalks of despoiled fennel.

And yet under the influence of that old, weather-stained temple are perhaps growing up--though you do not once fancy it--souls possessed of an energy, an industry, and a respect for virtue, which will make them stronger for the real work of life than all the elegant children of a city. One lesson, which even the rudest churches of New England teach,--with all their harshness, and all their repulsive severity of form,--is the lesson of Self-Denial. Once armed with that, and manhood is strong. The soul that possesses the consciousness of mastering passion, is endowed with an element of force that can never harmonize with defeat. Difficulties it wears like a summer garment, and flings away at the first approach of the winter of Need.

Let not any one suppose, then, that in this detail of the country life through which our hero is led, I would cast obloquy or a sneer upon its simplicity, or upon its lack of refinement. Goodness and strength in this world are quite as apt to wear rough coats as fine ones. And the words of thorough and self-sacrificing kindness are far more often dressed in the uncouth sounds of retired life than in the polished utterance of the town. Heaven has not made warm hearts and honest hearts distinguishable by the quality of the covering. True diamonds need no work of the artificer to reflect and multiply their rays. Goodness is more within than without; and purity is of nearer kin to the soul than to the body.

----And, Clarence, it may well happen that later in life--under the gorgeous ceilings of Venetian churches, or at some splendid mass in Nôtre Dame, with embroidered coats and costly silks around you--your thoughts will run back to that little storm-beaten church, and to the willow waving in its yard, with a Hope that _glows_, and with a tear that you embalm!

VIII.

_A Home Scene._

And now I shall not leave this realm of boyhood, or suffer my hero to slip away from this gala-time of his life, without a fair look at that Home where his present pleasures lie, and where all his dreams begin and end.

Little does the boy know, as the tide of years drifts by, floating him out insensibly from the harbor of his home upon the great sea of life,--what joys, what opportunities, what affections, are slipping from him into the shades of that inexorable Past, where no man can go save on the wings of his dreams. Little does he think--and God be praised that the thought does not sink deep lines in his young forehead!--as he leans upon the lap of his mother, with his eye turned to her in some earnest pleading for a fancied pleasure of the hour, or in some important story of his griefs, that such sharing of his sorrows, and such sympathy with his wishes, he will find nowhere again.

Little does he imagine that the fond Nelly, ever thoughtful of his pleasure, ever smiling away his griefs, will soon be beyond the reach of either, and that the waves of the years, which come rocking so gently under him, will soon toss her far away upon the great swell of life.

But _now_ you are there. The firelight glimmers upon the walls of your cherished home, like the Vestal fire of old upon the figures of adoring virgins, or like the flame of Hebrew sacrifice, whose incense bore hearts to Heaven. The big chair of your father is drawn to its wonted corner by the chimney-side; his head, just touched with gray, lies back upon its oaken top. Little Nelly leans upon his knee, looking up for some reply to her girlish questionings. Opposite sits your mother: her figure is thin, her look cheerful, yet subdued; her arm perhaps resting on your shoulder, as she talks to you in tones of tender admonition of the days that are to come.

The cat is purring on the hearth; the clock, that ticked so plainly when Charlie died, is ticking on the mantel still. The great table in the middle of the room with its books and work waits only for the lighting of the evening lamp, to see a return to its stores of embroidery, and of story.

Upon a little stand under the mirror, which catches now and then a flicker of the firelight, and makes it play wantonly over the ceiling, lies that big book reverenced of your New-England parents,--the Family Bible. It is a ponderous square volume, with heavy silver clasps that you have often pressed open for a look at its quaint old pictures, or for a study of those prettily bordered pages which lie between the Testaments, and which hold the Family Record.

There are the Births,--your father's, and your mother's; it seems as if they were born a long time ago; and even your own date of birth appears an almost incredible distance back. Then there are the marriages,--only one as yet; and your mother's maiden name looks oddly to you: it is hard to think of her as any one else than your doting parent. You wonder if your name will ever come under that paging; and wonder, though you scarce whisper the wonder to yourself, how another name would look, just below yours,--such a name, for instance, as Fanny, or as Miss Margaret Boyne!

Last of all come the Deaths,--only one. Poor Charlie! How it looks?--"Died 12 September 18--Charles Henry, aged four years." You know just how it looks. You have turned to it often; there you seem to be joined to him, though only by the turning of a leaf. And over your thoughts, as you look at that page of the record, there sometimes wanders a vague shadowy fear, which _will_ come,--that your own name may soon be there. You try to drop the notion, as if it were not fairly your own; you affect to slight it, as you would slight a boy who presumed on your acquaintance, but whom you have no desire to know. It is a common thing, you will find, with our world to decline familiarity with those ideas that fright us.

Yet your mother--how strange it is!--has no fears of such dark fancies. Even now as you stand beside her, and as the twilight deepens in the room, her low, silvery voice is stealing upon your ear, telling you that she cannot be long with you; that the time is coming when you must be guided by your own judgment, and struggle with the world unaided by the friends of your boyhood. There is a little pride, and a great deal more of anxiety, in your thoughts now, as you look steadfastly into the home blaze, while those delicate fingers, so tender of your happiness, play with the locks upon your brow.

----To struggle with the world,--that is a proud thing; to struggle alone,--there lies the doubt! Then crowds in swift upon the calm of boyhood the first anxious thought of youth; then chases over the sky of Spring the first heated and wrathful cloud of Summer.

But the lamps are now lit in the little parlor, and they shed a soft haze to the farthest corner of the room; while the firelight streams over the floor, where puss lies purring. Little Madge is there; she has dropped in softly with her mother, and Nelly has welcomed her with a bound and with a kiss. Jenny has not so rosy a cheek as Madge. But Jenny with her love-notes, and her languishing dark eye, you think of as a lady; and the thought of her is a constant drain upon your sentiment. As for Madge,--that girl Madge, whom you know so well,--you think of her as a sister; and yet--it is very odd--you look at her far oftener than you do at Nelly!

Frank too has come in to have a game with you at draughts; and he is in capital spirits, all brisk and glowing with his evening's walk. He--bless his honest heart!--never observes that you arrange the board very adroitly, so that you may keep half an eye upon Madge, as she sits yonder beside Nelly. Nor does he once notice your blush as you catch her eye when she raises her head to fling back the ringlets, and then with a sly look at you bends a most earnest gaze upon the board, as if she were especially interested in the disposition of the men.

You catch a little of the spirit of coquetry yourself,--(what a native growth it is!)--and if she lift her eyes when you are gazing at her, you very suddenly divert your look to the cat at her feet, and remark to your friend Frank in an easy off-hand way--how still the cat is lying!

And Frank turns--thinking probably, if he thinks at all about it, that cats are very apt to lie still when they sleep.

As for Nelly, half neglected by your thought as well as by your eye, while mischievous-looking Madge is sitting by her, you little know as yet what kindness, what gentleness, you are careless of. Few loves in life, and you will learn it before life is done, can balance the lost love of a sister.

As for your parents, in the intervals of the game you listen dreamily to their talk with the mother of Madge,--good Mrs. Boyne. It floats over your mind, as you rest your chin upon your clenched hand, like a strain of old familiar music,--a household strain that seems to belong to the habit of your ear,--a strain that will linger about it melodiously for many years to come,--a strain that will be recalled long time hence, when life is earnest and its cares heavy, with tears of regret and with sighs of bitterness.

By-and-by your game is done; and other games, in which join Nelly (the tears come when you write her name _now_!) and Madge, (the smiles come when you look on her _then_,) stretch out that sweet eventide of Home, until the lamp flickers, and you speak your friends--adieu. To Madge, it is said boldly,--a boldness put on to conceal a little lurking tremor; but there is no tremor in the home good-night.

----Aye, my boy, kiss your mother,--kiss her again; fondle your sweet Nelly; pass your little hand through the gray locks of your father; love them dearly while you can! Make your good-nights linger and make your adieus long, and sweet, and often repeated. Love with your whole soul,--Father, Mother, and Sister,--for these loves shall die!

----Not indeed in thought,--God be thanked! Nor yet in tears,--for He is merciful! But they shall die, as the leaves die,--die, as Spring dies into the heat and ripeness of Summer, and as boyhood dies into the elasticity and ambition of youth. Death, Distance, and Time shall each one of them dig graves for your affections; but this you do not know, nor can know, until the story of your life is ended.

The dreams of riches, of love, of voyage, of learning, that light up the boy age with splendor, will pass on and over into the hotter dreams of youth. Spring buds and blossoms, under the glowing sun of April, nurture at their heart those firstlings of fruit which the heat of summer shall ripen.

You little know--and for this you may well thank Heaven--that you are leaving the Spring of life, and that you are floating fast from the shady sources of your years into heat, bustle, and storm. Your dreams are now faint, flickering shadows, that play like fire-flies in the coppices of leafy June. They have no rule but the rule of infantile desire; they have no joys to promise greater than the joys that belong to your passing life; they have no terrors but such terrors as the darkness of a Spring night makes. They do not take hold on your soul as the dreams of youth and manhood will do.

Your highest hope is shadowed in a cheerful, boyish home. You wish no friends but the friends of boyhood; no sister but your fond Nelly; none to love better than the playful Madge.

You forget, Clarence, that the Spring with you is the Spring with them, and that the storms of Summer may chase wide shadows over your path and over theirs. And you forget that Summer is even now lowering with its mist, and with its scorching rays, upon the hem of your flowery May!

* * * * *

----The hands of the old clock upon the mantel, that ticked off the hours when Charlie sighed and when Charlie died, draw on toward midnight. The shadows that the fire-flame makes grow dimmer and dimmer. And thus it is that Home, boy home, passes away forever,--like the swaying of a pendulum,--like the fading of a shadow on the floor!

_SUMMER;_

OR,

_THE DREAMS OF YOUTH._

_DREAMS OF YOUTH._

_Summer._

I feel a great deal of pity for those honest but misguided people who call their little, spruce suburban towns, or the shaded streets of their inland cities,--the country and I have still more pity for those who reckon a season at the summer resorts--country enjoyment. Nay, my feeling is more violent than pity; and I count it nothing less than blasphemy so to take the name of the country in vain.

I thank Heaven every summer's day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks. And from all the tramp and bustle of the world into which fortune has led me in these latter years of my life, I delight to steal away for days, and for weeks together, and bathe my spirit in the freedom of the old woods; and to grow young again, lying upon the brook-side, and counting the white clouds that sail along the sky softly and tranquilly--even as holy memories go stealing over the vault of life.

I am deeply thankful that I could never find it in my heart so to pervert truth as to call the smart villages with the tricksy shadow of their maple avenues--the Country.

I love these in their way, and can recall pleasant passages of thought, as I have idled through the Sabbath-looking towns, or lounged at the inn-door of some quiet New-England village. But I love far better to leave them behind me, and to dash boldly out to where some out-lying farm-house sits--like a sentinel--under the shelter of wooded hills, or nestles in the lap of a noiseless valley.

In the town, small as it may be, and darkened as it may be with the shadows of trees, you cannot forget--men. Their voice, and strife, and ambition come to your eye in the painted paling, in the swinging signboard of the tavern, and--worst of all--in the trim-printed "ATTORNEY AT LAW." Even the little milliner's shop, with its meagre show of leghorns, and its string across the window all hung with tabs and with cloth roses, is a sad epitome of the great and conventional life of a city neighborhood.

I like to be rid of them all, as I am rid of them this midsummer's day. I like to steep my soul in a sea of quiet, with nothing floating past me, as I lie moored to my thought, but the perfume of flowers, and soaring birds, and shadows of clouds.

Two days since I was sweltering in the heat of the City, jostled by the thousand eager workers, and panting under the shadow of the walls. But I have stolen away; and for two hours of healthful regrowth into the darling Past I have been lying this blessed summer's morning upon the grassy bank of a stream that babbled me to sleep in boyhood.--Dear old stream, unchanging, unfaltering,--with no harsher notes now than then,--never growing old,--smiling in your silver rustle, and calming yourself in the broad, placid pools,--I love you as I love a friend!

But now that the sun has grown scalding hot, and the waves of heat have come rocking under the shadow of the meadow-oaks, I have sought shelter in a chamber of the old farm-house. The window-blinds are closed; but some of them are sadly shattered, and I have intertwined in them a few branches of the late-blossoming white azalia, so that every puff of the summer air comes to me cooled with fragrance. A dimple or two of the sunlight still steals through my flowery screen, and dances (as the breeze moves the branches) upon the oaken floor of the farm-house.

Through one little gap indeed I can see the broad stretch of meadow, and the workmen in the field bending and swaying to their scythes. I can see too the glistening of the steel, as they wipe their blades, and can just catch floating on the air the measured, tinkling thwack of the rifle-stroke.

Here and there a lark, scared from his feeding-place in the grass, soars up, bubbling forth his melody in globules of silvery sound, and settles upon some tall tree, and waves his wings, and sinks to the swaying twigs. I hear too a quail piping from the meadow fence, and another trilling his answering whistle from the hills. Nearer by, a tyrant king-bird is poised on the topmost branch of a veteran pear-tree, and now and then dashes down, assassin-like, upon some homebound, honey-laden bee, and then with a smack of his bill resumes his predatory watch.

A chicken or two lie in the sun, with a wing and a leg stretched out,--lazily picking at the gravel, or relieving their _ennui_ from time to time with a spasmodic rustle of their feathers. An old, matronly hen stalks about the yard with a sedate step, and with quiet self-assurance she utters an occasional series of hoarse and heated clucks. A speckled turkey, with an astonished brood at her heels, is eying curiously, and with earnest variations of the head, a full-fed cat, that lies curled up, and dozing, upon the floor of the cottage porch.

As I sit thus, watching through the interstices of my leafy screen the various images of country life, I hear distant mutterings from beyond the hills.

The sun has thrown its shadow upon the pewter dial two hours beyond the meridian line. Great cream colored heads of thunder-clouds are lifting above the sharp, clear line of the western horizon; the light breeze dies away, and the air becomes stifling, even under the shadow of my withered boughs in the chamber-window. The white-capped clouds roll up nearer and nearer to the sun, and the creamy masses below grow dark in their seams. The mutterings, that came faintly before, now spread into wide volumes of rolling sound, that echo again and again from the eastward heights.

I hear in the deep intervals the men shouting to their teams in the meadows; and great companies of startled swallows are dashing in all directions around the gray roofs of the barn.

The clouds have now wellnigh reached the sun, which seems to shine the fiercer for his coming eclipse. The whole west, as I look from the sources of the brook to its lazy drift under the swamps that lie to the south, is hung with a curtain of darkness; and like swift-working, golden ropes, that lift it toward the zenith, long chains of lightning flash through it; and the growing thunder seems like the rumble of the pulleys.

I thrust away my azalia-boughs, and fling back the shattered blinds, as the sun and the clouds meet, and my room darkens with the coming shadows. For an instant the edges of the thick, creamy masses of cloud are gilded by the shrouded sun, and show gorgeous scallops of gold, that toss upon the hem of the storm. But the blazonry fades as the clouds mount; and the brightening lines of the lightning dart up from the lower skirts, and heave the billowy masses into the middle heaven.

The workmen are urging their oxen fast across the meadow, and the loiterers come straggling after with rakes upon their shoulders. The matronly hen has retreated to the stable-door; and the brood of turkeys stand dressing their feathers under the open shed.

The air freshens, and blows now from the face of the coming clouds. I see the great elms in the plain swaying their tops, even before the storm-breeze has reached me; and a bit of ripened grain upon a swell of the meadow waves and tosses like a billowy sea.

Presently I hear the rush of the wind; and the cherry-and pear-trees rustle through all their leaves; and my paper is whisked away by the intruding blast.

There is a quiet of a moment, in which the wind even seems weary and faint, and nothing finds utterance save one hoarse tree-toad, doling out his lugubrious notes.

Now comes a blinding flash from the clouds, and a quick, sharp clang clatters through the heavens, and bellows loud and long among the hills. Then--like great grief spending its pent agony in tears--come the big drops of rain,--pattering on the lawn and on the leaves, and most musically of all upon the roof above me,--not now with the light fall of the Spring shower, but with strong steppings, like the first proud tread of Youth!

I.

_Cloister Life._

It has very likely occurred to you, my reader, that I am playing the wanton in these sketches, and am breaking through all the canons of the writers in making You my hero.

It is even so; for my work is a story of those vague feelings, doubts, passions, which belong more or less to every man of us all; and therefore it is that I lay upon your shoulders the burden of these dreams. If this or that one never belonged to your experience, have patience for a while. I feel sure that others are coming which will lie like a truth upon your heart, and draw you unwittingly--perhaps tearfully even--into the belief that You are indeed my hero.

The scene now changes to the cloister of a college; not the gray, classic cloisters which lie along the banks of the Cam or the Isis,--huge, battered hulks, on whose weather-stained decks great captains of learning have fought away their lives,--nor yet the cavernous, quadrangular courts that sleep under the dingy walls of the Sorbonne.

The youth-dreams of Clarence begin under the roof of one of those long, ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of New England.

The floor of the room is rough, and divided by wide seams. The study-table does not stand firmly without a few spare pennies to prop it into solid footing. The bookcase of stained fir-wood, suspended against the wall by cords, is meagrely stocked with a couple of Lexicons, a pair of Grammars, a Euclid, a Xenophon, a Homer, and a Livy. Beside these are scattered about here and there a thumb-worn copy of British ballads, an odd volume of the "Sketch-Book," a clumsy Shakspeare, and a pocket edition of the Bible.

With such appliances, added to the half-score of professors and tutors who preside over the awful precincts, you are to work your way up to that proud entrance upon our American life which begins with the Baccalaureate degree. There is a tingling sensation in first walking under the shadow of those walls, uncouth as they are, and in feeling that you belong to them,--that you are a member, as it were, of the body-corporate, subject to an actual code of printed laws, and to actual moneyed fines varying from a shilling to fifty cents!

There is something exhilarating in the very consciousness of your subject state, and in the necessity of measuring your hours by the habit of such a learned community. You think back upon your respect for the lank figure of some old teacher of boy-days as a childish weakness; even the little coteries of the home fireside lose their importance when compared with the extraordinary sweep and dignity of your present position.

It is pleasant to measure yourself with men; and there are those about you who seem to your untaught eye to be men already. Your chum, a hard-faced fellow of ten more years than you, digging sturdily at his tasks, seems by that very community of work to dignify your labor. You watch his cold, gray eye bending down over some theorem of Euclid, with a kind of proud companionship in what so tasks his manliness.

It is nothing for him to quit sleep at the first tinkling of the alarm-clock that hangs in your chamber, or to brave the weather in that cheerless run to the morning prayers of winter. Yet with what a dreamy horror you wake on mornings of snow to that tinkling alarum!--and glide in the cold and darkness under the shadow of the college-walls, shuddering under the sharp gusts that come sweeping between the buildings,--and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs through in gentle and tremulous tones his wonted form of invocation.

Your Division room is steaming with foul heat, and there is a strong smell of burnt feathers and oil. A jaunty tutor with pug nose and consequential air steps into the room--while you all rise to show him deference--and takes his place at the pulpit-like desk. Then come the formal loosing of his camlet cloak-clasp,--the opening of his sweaty Xenophon to where the day's _parasangs_ begin,--the unsliding of his silver pencil-case,--the keen, sour look around the benches, and the cool pinch of his thumb and forefinger into the fearful box of names!

How you listen for each as it is uttered,--running down the page in advance,--rejoicing when some hard passage comes to a stout man in the corner; and what a sigh of relief--on mornings after you have been out late at night--when the last paragraph is reached, the ballot drawn, and--you, safe!

You speculate dreamily upon the faces around you. You wonder what sort of schooling they may have had, and what sort of homes. You think one man has got an extraordinary name, and another a still more extraordinary nose. The glib, easy way of one student, and his perfect _sang-froid_, completely charm you: you set him down in your own mind as a kind of Crichton. Another weazen-faced, pinched-up fellow in a scant cloak, you think must have been sometime a schoolmaster: he is so very precise, and wears such an indescribable look of the ferule. There is one big student, with a huge beard and a rollicking good-natured eye, whom you would quite like to see measure strength with your old usher, and on careful comparison rather think the usher would get the worst of it. Another appears as venerable as some fathers you have seen; and it seems wonderfully odd that a man old enough to have children should recite Xenophon by morning candle-light!

The class in advance you study curiously; and are quite amazed at the precocity of certain youths belonging to it, who are apparently about your own age. The Juniors you look upon with a quiet reverence for their aplomb and dignity of character; and look forward with intense yearnings to the time when you too shall be admitted freely to the precincts of the Philosophical chamber, and to the very steep benches of the Laboratory. This last seems, from occasional peeps through the blinds, a most mysterious building. The chimneys, recesses, vats, and cisterns--to say nothing of certain galvanic communications, which, you are told, traverse the whole building in a way capable of killing a rat at an incredible remove from the bland professor--utterly fatigue your wonder! You humbly trust--though you have doubts upon the point--that you will have the capacity to grasp it all, when once you shall have arrived at the dignity of a Junior.

As for the Seniors, your admiration for them is entirely boundless. In one or two individual instances, it is true, it has been broken down by an unfortunate squabble with thick-set fellows in the Chapel aisle. A person who sits not far before you at prayers, and whose name you seek out very early, bears a strong resemblance to some portrait of Dr. Johnson; you have very much the same kind of respect for him that you feel for the great lexicographer, and do not for a moment doubt his capacity to compile a dictionary equal, if not superior, to Johnson's.

Another man with very bushy, black hair, and an easy look of importance, carries a large cane, and is represented to you as an astonishing scholar and speaker. You do not doubt it; his very air proclaims it. You think of him as presently--(say four or five years hence)--astounding the United States Senate with his eloquence. And when once you have heard him in debate, with that ineffable gesture of his, you absolutely languish in your admiration for him, and you describe his speaking to your country friends as very little inferior, if at all, to Mr. Burke's. Beside this one are some half dozen others, among whom the question of superiority is, you understand, strongly mooted. It puzzles you to think, what an avalanche of talent will fall upon the country at the graduation of those Seniors!

You will find however that the country bears such inundations of college talent with a remarkable degree of equanimity. It is quite wonderful how all the Burkes, and Scotts, and Peels, among college Seniors, do quietly disappear, as a man gets on in life.

As for any degree of fellowship with such giants, it is an honor hardly to be thought of. But you have a classmate--I will call him Dalton--who is very intimate with a dashing Senior; they room near each other outside the college. You quite envy Dalton, and you come to know him well. He says that you are not a "green-one,"--that you have "cut your eye-teeth"; in return for which complimentary opinions you entertain a strong friendship for Dalton.

He is a "fast" fellow, as the Senior calls him; and it is a proud thing to happen at their rooms occasionally, and to match yourself for an hour or two (with the windows darkened) against a Senior at "old sledge." It is quite "the thing," as Dalton says, to meet a Senior familiarly in the street. Sometimes you go, after Dalton has taught you "the ropes," to have a cosy sit-down over oysters and champagne,--to which the Senior lends himself with the pleasantest condescension in the world. You are not altogether used to hard drinking; but this you conceal--as most spirited young fellows do--by drinking a great deal. You have a dim recollection of certain circumstances--very unimportant, yet very vividly impressed on your mind--which occurred on one of these occasions.

The oysters were exceedingly fine, and the champagne exquisite. You have a recollection of something being said, toward the end of the first bottle, of Xenophon, and of the Senior's saying in his playful way, "Oh, d--n Xenophon!"

You remember Dalton laughed at this; and you laughed--for company. You remember that you thought, and Dalton thought, and the Senior thought, by a singular coincidence, that the second bottle of champagne was better even than the first. You have a dim remembrance of the Senior's saying very loudly, "Clarence--(calling you by your family name)--is no spooney;" and drinking a bumper with you in confirmation of the remark.

You remember that Dalton broke out into a song, and that for a time you joined in the chorus; you think the Senior called you to order for repeating the chorus in the wrong place. You think the lights burned with remarkable brilliancy; and you remember that a remark of yours to that effect met with very much such a response from the Senior as he had before employed with reference to Xenophon.

You have a confused idea of calling Dalton--Xenophon. You think the meeting broke up with a chorus, and that somebody--you cannot tell who--broke two or three glasses. You remember questioning yourself very seriously as to whether you were, or were not, tipsy. You think you decided that you were not, but--might be.

You have a confused recollection of leaning upon some one, or something, going to your room; this sense of a desire to lean, you think, was very strong. You remember being horribly afflicted with the idea of having tried your night-key at the tutor's door, instead of your own; you remember further a hot stove,--made certain indeed by a large blister which appeared on your hand next day. You think of throwing off your clothes by one or two spasmodic efforts,--leaning in the intervals against the bedpost.

There is a recollection of an uncommon dizziness afterward, as if your body was very quiet, and your head gyrating with strange velocity, and a kind of centrifugal action, all about the room, and the college, and indeed the whole town. You think that you felt uncontrollable nausea after this, followed by positive sickness,--which waked your chum, who thought you very incoherent, and feared derangement.

A dismal state of lassitude follows, broken by the college-clock striking three, and by very rambling reflections upon champagne, Xenophon, "Captain Dick," Madge, and the old deacon who clinched his wig in the church.

The next morning (ah, how vexatious that all our follies are followed by a "next morning!") you wake with a parched mouth, and a torturing thirst; the sun is shining broadly into your reeking chamber. Prayers and recitations are long ago over; and you see through the door in the outer room that hard-faced chum with his Lexicon and Livy open before him, working out with all the earnestness of his iron purpose the steady steps toward preferment and success.

You go with some story of sudden sickness to the tutor,--half fearful that the bloodshot, swollen eyes will betray you. It is very mortifying too to meet Dalton appearing so gay and lively after it all, while you wear such an air of being "used up." You envy him thoroughly the extraordinary capacity that he has.

Here and there creeps in, amid all the pride and shame of the new life, a tender thought of the old home; but its joys are joys no longer: its highest aspirations even have resolved themselves into fine mist,--- like rainbows that the sun drinks with his beams.

The affection for a mother, whose kindness you recall with a suffused eye, is not gone, or blighted; but it is woven up, as only a single adorning tissue, into the growing pride of youth: it is cherished in the proud soul rather as a redeeming weakness than as a vital energy.

And the love for Nelly, though it bates no jot of fervor, is woven into the scale of growing purposes rather as a color to adorn than as a strand to strengthen.

As for your other loves, those romantic ones which were kindled by bright eyes, and the stolen reading of Miss Porter's novels, they linger on your mind like perfumes; and they float down your memory--with the figure, the step, the last words of those young girls who raised them--like the types of some dimly shadowed but deeper passion, which is some time to spur your maturer purposes and to quicken your manly resolves.

It would be hard to tell, for you do not as yet know, but that Madge herself--hoidenish, blue-eyed Madge--is to be the very one who will gain such hold upon your riper affections as she has held already over your boyish caprice. It is a part of the pride--I may say rather an evidence of the pride--which youth feels in leaving boyhood behind him, to talk laughingly and carelessly of those attachments which made his young years so balmy with dreams.

II.

_First Ambition._

I believe that sooner or later there come to every man dreams of ambition. They may be covered with the sloth of habit, or with the pretence of humility; they may come only in dim, shadowy visions, that feed the eye like the glories of an ocean sunrise; but you may be sure that they will come: even before one is aware, the bold, adventurous goddess, whose name is Ambition, and whose dower is Fame, will be toying with the feeble heart. And she pushes her ventures with a bold hand; she makes timidity strong, and weakness valiant.

The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him,--coming from above, and from around;--but a way foreshadowed is not a way made. And the making of a man's way comes only from that quickening of resolve which we call Ambition. It is the spur that makes man struggle with Destiny: it is Heaven's own incentive, to make Purpose great, and Achievement greater.

It would be strange if you, in that cloister life of a college, did not sometimes feel a dawning of new resolves. They grapple you indeed oftener than you dare to speak of. Here you dream first of that very sweet, but very shadowy success called Reputation.

You think of the delight and astonishment it would give your mother and father, and most of all little Nelly, if you were winning such honors as now escape you. You measure your capacities by those about you, and watch their habit of study; you gaze for a half-hour together upon some successful man who has won his prizes, and wonder by what secret action he has done it. And when in time you come to be a competitor yourself, your anxiety is immense.

You spend hours upon hours at your theme. You write and rewrite; and when it is at length complete and out of your hands, you are harassed by a thousand doubts. At times, as you recall your hours of toil, you question if so much has been spent upon any other; you feel almost certain of success. You repeat to yourself some passages of special eloquence at night. You fancy the admiration of the professors at meeting with such a wonderful performance. You have a slight fear that its superior goodness may awaken the suspicion that some one out of the college, some superior man, may have written it. But this fear dies away.

The eventful day is a great one in your calendar you hardly sleep the night previous. You tremble as the chapel-bell is rung; you profess to be very indifferent, as the reading and the prayer close; you even stoop to take up your hat, as if you had entirely overlooked the fact that the old President was in the desk for the express purpose of declaring the successful names. You listen dreamily to his tremulous, yet fearfully distinct enunciation. Your head swims strangely.

They all pass out with a harsh murmur along the aisles and through the doorways. It would be well if there were no disappointments in life more terrible than this. It is consoling to express very depreciating opinions of the Faculty in general,--and very contemptuous ones of that particular officer who decided upon the merit of the prize-themes. An evening or two at Dalton's room go still farther toward healing the disappointment, and--if it must be said--toward moderating the heat of your ambition.

You grow up however, unfortunately, as the college years fly by, into a very exaggerated sense of your own capacities. Even the good, old, white-haired Squire, for whom you once entertained so much respect, seems to your crazy, classic fancy a very humdrum sort of personage. Frank, although as noble a fellow as ever sat a horse, is yet--you cannot help thinking--very ignorant of Euripides; even the English master at Dr. Bidlow's school, you feel sure, would balk at a dozen problems you could give him.

You get an exalted idea of that uncertain quality which turns the heads of a vast many of your fellows, called--Genius. An odd notion seems to be inherent in the atmosphere of those college chambers, that there is a certain faculty of mind--first developed, as would seem, in colleges--which accomplishes whatever it chooses without any special painstaking. For a time you fall yourself into this very unfortunate hallucination; you cultivate it after the usual college fashion, by drinking a vast deal of strong coffee and whiskey-toddy, by writing a little poor verse in the Byronic temper, and by studying very late at night with closed blinds.

It costs you however more anxiety and hypocrisy than you could possibly have believed.

----You will learn, Clarence, when the Autumn has rounded your hopeful Summer, if not before, that there is no Genius in life like the Genius of energy and industry. You will learn, that all the traditions so current among very young men that certain great characters have wrought their greatness by an inspiration, as it were, grow out of a sad mistake.

And you will further find, when you come to measure yourself with men, that there are no rivals so formidable as those earnest, determined minds which reckon the value of every hour, and which achieve eminence by persistent application.

Literary ambition may inflame you at certain periods and a thought of some great names will flash like a spark into the mine of your purposes; you dream till midnight over books; you set up shadows, and chase them down,--other shadows, and they fly. Dreaming will never catch them. Nothing makes the "scent lie well" in the hunt after distinction, but labor.

And it is a glorious thing, when once you are weary of the dissipation, and the _ennui_ of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing page of an earnest thinker, and read--deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to the consciousness of your real capacities: you feel sure that they have taken a new step toward final development. In such mood it is that one feels grateful to the musty tomes, which at other hours stand like wonder-making mummies with no warmth and no vitality. Now they grow into the affections like new-found friends, and gain a hold upon the heart, and light a fire in the brain, that the years and the mould cannot cover nor quench.

III.

_College Romance._

In following the mental vagaries of youth, I must not forget the curvetings and wiltings of the heart.

The black-eyed Jenny, with whom a correspondence at red heat was kept up for several weeks, is long before this entirely out of your regard,--not so much by reason of the six months' disparity of age, as from the fact, communicated quite confidentially by the travelled Nat, that she has had a desperate flirtation with a handsome midshipman. The conclusion is natural that she is an inconstant, cruel-hearted creature, with little appreciation of real worth; and furthermore, that all midshipmen are a very contemptible--not to say dangerous--set of men. She is consigned to forgetfulness and neglect; and the late lover has long ago consoled himself by reading in a spirited way that passage of Childe Harold commencing,--

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me."

As for Madge, the memory of her has been more wakeful, but less violent. To say nothing of occasional returns to the old homestead, when you have met her Nelly's letters not unfrequently drop a careless half-sentence that keeps her strangely in mind.

"Madge," she says, "is sitting by me with her work;" or, "You ought to see the little silk purse that Madge is knitting;" or,--speaking of some country rout,--"Madge was there in the sweetest dress you can imagine." All this will keep Madge in mind; not, it is true, in the ambitious moods, or in the frolics with Dalton; but in those odd half-hours that come stealing over one at twilight, laden with sweet memories of the days of old.

A new romantic admiration is started by those pale lady-faces which light up on a Sunday the gallery of the college chapel. An amiable and modest fancy gives to them all a sweet classic grace. The very atmosphere of these courts, wakened with high metaphysic discourse, seems to lend them a Greek beauty and fineness; and you attach to the prettiest, that your eye can reach, all the charms of some Sciote maiden, and all the learning of her father--the professor. And as you lie half-wakeful and half-dreaming, through the long Divisions of the Doctor's morning discourse, the twinkling eyes in some corner of the gallery bear you pleasant company as you float down those streaming visions which radiate from you far over the track of the coming life.

But following very closely upon this comes a whole volume of street romance. There are prettily shaped figures that go floating at convenient hours for college observation along the thoroughfares of the town. And these figures come to be known, and the dresses, and the streets; and even the door-plate is studied. The hours are ascertained, by careful observation and induction, at which some particular figure is to be met,--or is to be seen at some low parlor-window, in white summer dress, with head leaning on the hand, very melancholy, and very dangerous. Perhaps her very card is stuck proudly into a corner of the mirror in the college-chamber. After this may come moonlight meetings at the gate, or long listenings to the plaintive lyrics that steal out of the parlor-windows, and that blur wofully the text of the Conic Sections.

Or perhaps she is under the fierce eye of some Cerberus of a schoolmistress, about whose grounds you prowl piteously, searching for small knot-holes in the surrounding board fence, through which little _souvenirs_ of impassioned feeling may be thrust. Sonnets are written for the town papers, full of telling phrases, and with classic allusions and foot-notes which draw attention to some similar felicity of expression in Horace or Ovid. Correspondence may even be ventured on, enclosing locks of hair, and interchanging rings, and paper oaths of eternal fidelity.

But the old Cerberus is very wakeful: the letters fail; the lamp that used to glimmer for a sign among the sycamores is gone out; a stolen wave of a handkerchief, a despairing look, and tears,--which you fancy, but do not see,--make you miserable for long days.

The tyrant teacher, with no trace of compassion in her withered heart, reports you to the college authorities. There is a long lecture of admonition upon the folly of such dangerous practices; and if the offence be aggravated by some recent joviality with Dalton and the Senior, you are condemned to a month of exile with a country clergyman. There are a few tearful regrets over the painful tone of the home letters; but the bracing country air, and the pretty faces of the village girls, heal your heart--with fresh wounds.

The old Doctor sees dimly through his spectacles; and his pew gives a good look-out upon the smiling choir of singers. A collegian wears the honors of a stranger, and the country bucks stand but poor chance in contrast with your wonderful attainments in cravats and verses. But this fresh dream, odorous with its memories of sleigh-rides or lilac-blossoms, slips by, and yields again to the more ambitious dreams of the cloister.

In the prouder moments that come when you are more a man and less a boy,--with more of strategy and less of faith,--your thought of woman runs loftily; not loftily in the realm of virtue or goodness, but loftily on your new world-scale. The pride of intellect, that is thirsting in you, fashions ideal graces after a classic model. The heroines of fable are admired; and the soul is tortured with that intensity of passion which gleams through the broken utterances of Grecian tragedy.