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!"