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.
In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the
ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart. You turn away
from all such with a sigh of conceit, to graze on that lofty but bitter
pasturage where no daisies grow. Admiration may be called up by some
graceful figure that you see moving under those sweeping elms; and you
follow it with an intensity of look that makes you blush, and
straightway hide the memory of the blush by summing up some artful
sophistry, that resolves your delighted gaze into a weakness, and your
contempt into a virtue.
But this cannot last. As the years drop off, a certain pair of eyes beam
one day upon you that seem to have been cut out of a page of Greek
poetry. They have all its sentiment, its fire, its intellectual reaches:
it would be hard to say what they have not. The profile is a Greek
profile, and the heavy chestnut hair is plaited in Greek bands. The
figure, too, might easily be that of Helen, or of Andromache.
You gaze, ashamed to gaze; and your heart yearns, ashamed of its
yearning. It is no young girl who is thus testing you: there is too
much pride for that. A ripeness and maturity rest upon her look and
figure that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have
wrought out of the Grecian heaven. The vision steals upon you at all
hours,--now rounding its flowing outline to the mellifluous metre of
Epic hexameter, and again with its bounding life pulsating with the
glorious dashes of tragic verse.
Yet with the exception of stolen glances and secret admiration, you keep
aloof. There is no wish to fathom what seems a happy mystery. There lies
a content in secret obeisance. Sometimes it shames you, as your mind
glows with its fancied dignity; but the heart thrusts in its voice; and,
yielding to it, you dream dreams like fond old Boccaccio's upon the
olive-shaded slopes of Italy. The tongue even is not trusted with the
thoughts that are seething within: they begin and end in the voiceless
pulsations of your nature.
After a time--it seems a long time, but it is in truth a very short
time--you find who she is who is thus entrancing you. It is done most
carelessly. No creature could imagine that you felt any interest in the
accomplished sister--of your friend Dalton. Yet it is even she who has
thus beguiled you; and she is at least some ten years Dalton's senior,
and by even more years--your own!
It is singular enough, but it is true, that the affections of that
transition state from youth to manliness run toward the types of
maturity. The mind in its reaches toward strength and completeness
creates a heart-sympathy--which in its turn craves fulness. There is a
vanity too about the first steps of manly education, which is disposed
to underrate the innocence and unripened judgment of the other sex. Men
see the mistake as they grow older; for the judgment of a woman, in all
matters of the affections, ripens by ten years faster than a man's.
In place of any relentings on such score you are set on fire anew. The
stories of her accomplishments, and of her grace of conversation,
absolutely drive you mad. You watch your occasion for meeting her upon
the street. You wonder if she has any conception of your capacity for
mental labor, and if she has any adequate idea of your admiration for
Greek poetry, and for herself.
You tie your cravat poet-wise, and wear broad collars turned down,
wondering how such disposition may affect her. Her figure and step
become a kind of moving romance to you, drifting forward and outward
into that great land of dreams which you call the world. When you see
her walking with others, you pity her, and feel perfectly sure, that, if
she had only a hint of that intellectual fervor which in your own mind
blazes up at the very thought of her, she would perfectly scorn the
stout gentleman who spends his force in tawdry compliments.
A visit to your home wakens ardor by contrast as much as by absence.
Madge, so gentle, and now stealing sly looks at you in a way so
different from her hoidenish manner of school-days, you regard
complacently as a most lovable, fond girl,--the very one for some fond
and amiable young man whose soul is not filled, as yours is, with higher
things! To Nelly, earnestly listening, you drop only exaggerated hints
of the wonderful beauty and dignity of this new being of your fancy. Of
her age you scrupulously say nothing.
The trivialities of Dalton amaze you: it is hard to understand how a man
within the limit of such influences as Miss Dalton must inevitably
exert, can tamely sit down to a rubber of whist, and cigars! There must
be a sad lack of congeniality;--it would certainly be a proud thing to
supply that lack!
The new feeling, wild and vague as it is,--for as yet you have only most
casual acquaintance with Laura Dalton,--invests the whole habit of your
study; not quickening overmuch the relish for Dugald Stewart, or the
miserable skeleton of college Logic, but spending a sweet charm upon the
graces of Rhetoric and the music of Classic Verse. It blends
harmoniously with your quickened ambition. There is some last appearance
that you have to make upon the college stage, in the presence of the
great worthies of the State, and of all the beauties of the town,--Laura
chiefest among them. In view of it you feel dismally intellectual.
Prodigious faculties are to be brought to the task.
You think of throwing out ideas that will quite startle His Excellency
the Governor, and those very distinguished public characters whom the
college purveyors vote into their periodic public sittings. You are
quite sure of surprising them, and of deeply provoking such scheming,
shallow politicians as have never read Wayland's "Treatise," and who
venture incautiously within hearing of your remarks. You fancy yourself
in advance the victim of a long leader in the next day's paper, and the
thoughtful but quiet cause of a great change in the political programme
of the State. But crowning and eclipsing all the triumph, are those dark
eyes beaming on you from some corner of the church their floods of
unconscious praise and tenderness.
Your father and Nelly are there to greet you. He has spoken a few calm,
quiet words of encouragement, that make you feel--very wrongfully--that
he is a cold man, with no earnestness of feeling. As for Nelly, she
clasps your arm with a fondness, and with a pride, that tell at every
step her praises and her love.
But even this, true and healthful as it is, fades before a single word
of commendation from the new arbitress of your feeling. You have seen
Miss Dalton! You have met her on that last evening of your cloistered
life in all the elegance of ball-costume; your eye has feasted on her
elegant figure, and upon her eye sparkling with the consciousness of
beauty. You have talked with Miss Dalton about Byron, about Wordsworth,
about Homer. You have quoted poetry to Miss Dalton; you have clasped
Miss Dalton's hand!
Her conversation delights you by its piquancy and grace; she is quite
ready to meet you (a grave matter of surprise!) upon whatever subject
you may suggest. You lapse easily and lovingly into the current of her
thought, and blush to find yourself vacantly admiring when she is
looking for reply. The regard you feel for her resolves itself into an
exquisite mental love, vastly superior, as you think, to any other kind
of love. There is no dream of marriage as yet, but only of sitting
beside her in the moonlight during a countless succession of hours, and
talking of poetry and nature, of destiny and love.
Magnificent Miss Dalton!