1827-1831. AEt. 13-17.
COLLEGE LIFE.
Such then was the boy who at the immature, we might almost say the
tender, age of thirteen entered Harvard College. Though two years after
me in college standing, I remember the boyish reputation which he brought
with him, especially that of a wonderful linguist, and the impression
which his striking personal beauty produced upon us as he took his seat
in the college chapel. But it was not until long after this period that I
became intimately acquainted with him, and I must again have recourse to
the classmates and friends who have favored me with their reminiscences
of this period of his life. Mr. Phillips says:
“During our first year in college, though the youngest in the class,
he stood third, I think, or second in college rank, and ours was an
especially able class. Yet to maintain this rank he neither cared
nor needed to make any effort. Too young to feel any
responsibilities, and not yet awake to any ambition, he became so
negligent that he was 'rusticated' [that is, sent away from college
for a time]. He came back sobered, and worked rather more, but with
no effort for college rank thenceforward.”
I must finish the portrait of the collegian with all its lights and
shadows by the help of the same friends from whom I have borrowed the
preceding outlines.
He did not care to make acquaintances, was haughty in manner and cynical
in mood, at least as he appeared to those in whom he felt no special
interest. It is no wonder, therefore, that he was not a popular favorite,
although recognized as having very brilliant qualities. During all this
period his mind was doubtless fermenting with projects which kept him in
a fevered and irritable condition. “He had a small writing-table,” Mr.
Phillips says, “with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it half full of
sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a play, prose
portraits of some pet character, etc. These he would read to me, though
he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt the whole
and began to fill the drawer again.”
My friend, Mr. John Osborne Sargent, who was a year before him in
college, says, in a very interesting letter with which he has favored me:
“My first acquaintance with him [Motley] was at Cambridge, when he
came from Mr. Cogswell's school at Round Hill. He then had a good
deal of the shyness that was just pronounced enough to make him
interesting, and which did not entirely wear off till he left
college. . . I soon became acquainted with him, and we used to take
long walks together, sometimes taxing each other's memory for poems
or passages from poems that had struck our fancy. Shelley was then
a great favorite of his, and I remember that Praed's verses then
appearing in the 'New Monthly' he thought very clever and brilliant,
and was fond of repeating them. You have forgotten, or perhaps
never knew, that Motley's first appearance in print was in the
'Collegian.' He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a
translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by
inserting. It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity.
. . . How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not
remember. I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a
member of the Knights of the Square Table,--always my favorite
college club, for the reason, perhaps, that I was a sometime Grand
Master. He was always a genial and jovial companion at our supper-
parties at Fresh Pond and Gallagher's.”
We who live in the days of photographs know how many faces belong to
every individual. We know too under what different aspects the same
character appears to those who study it from different points of view and
with different prepossessions. I do not hesitate, therefore, to place
side by side the impressions of two of his classmates as to one of his
personal traits as they observed him at this period of his youth.
“He was a manly boy, with no love for or leaning to girls' company;
no care for dress; not a trace of personal vanity. . . . He was,
or at least seemed, wholly unconscious of his rare beauty and of the
fascination of his manner; not a trace of pretence, the simplest and
most natural creature in the world.”