SCHOOLMATES slip out of sight and knowledge, and are forgotten; or if
you meet them they bear another character; the boy is not there. It is a
new acquaintance that you make, with nothing of your fellow upon the
benches but the name. Though the eye and face cleave to your memory, and
you meet them afterward, and think you have met a friend—the voice or
the action will break down the charm, and you find only—another man.
But with your classmates in that later school, where form and character
were both nearer ripeness, and where knowledge, labored for together,
bred the first manly sympathies—it is different. And as you meet them,
or hear of them, the thought of their advance makes a measure of your
own—it makes a measure of the NOW.
You judge of your happiness by theirs—of your progress by theirs, and of
your prospects by theirs. If one is happy, you seek to trace out the way
by which he has wrought his happiness; you consider how it differs from
your own; and you think with sighs how you might possibly have wrought
the same; but _now_ it has escaped. If another has won some honorable
distinction, you fall to thinking how the man—your old equal, as you
thought, upon the college benches—has outrun you. It pricks to effort,
and teaches the difference between now and then. Life, with all its
duties and hopes, gathers upon your present like a great weight, or like
a storm ready to burst. It is met anew; it pleads more strongly; and
action that has been neglected rises before you—a giant of remorse.
Stop not, loiter not, look not backward, if you would be among the
foremost! The great Now, so quick, so broad, so fleeting, is yours—in an
hour it will belong to the eternity of the past. The temper of life is
to be made good by big, honest blows; stop striking, and you will do
nothing; strike feebly, and you will do almost as little. Success rides
on every hour; grapple it, and you may win; but without a grapple it
will never go with you. Work is the weapon of honor, and who lacks the
weapon will never triumph.
There were some seventy of us—all scattered now. I meet one here and
there at wide distances apart; and we talk together of old days, and of
our present work and life—and separate. Just so ships at sea, in murky
weather, will shift their course to come within hailing distance, and
compare their longitude, and—part. One I have met wandering in southern
Italy, dreaming—as I was dreaming—over the tomb of Virgil, by the dark
grotto of Pausilippo. It seemed strange to talk of our old readings in
Tacitus there upon classic ground; but we did; and ran on to talk of our
lives; and, sitting down upon the promontory of Baie, looking off upon
that blue sea, as clear as the classics, we told each other our
respective stories. And two nights after, upon the quay, in sight of
Vesuvius, which shed a lurid glow upon the sky that was reflected from
the white walls of the Hotel de Russie, and from the broad lava
pavements, we parted—he to wander among the isles of the Ægean, and I to
turn northward.
Another time, as I was wandering among those mysterious figures that
crowd the foyer of the French opera upon a night of the Masked Ball, I
saw a familiar face; I followed it with my eye until I became convinced.
He did not know me until I named his old seat upon the bench of the
division rooms, and the hard-faced Tutor G——. Then we talked of the old
rivalries, and Christmas jollities, and of this and that one, whom we
had come upon in our wayward tracks; while the black-robed grisettes
stared through their velvet masks; nor did we tire of comparing the old
memories with the unearthly gayety of the scene about us until daylight
broke.
In a quiet mountain town of New England I came not long since upon
another; he was hale and hearty, and pushing his lawyer work with just
the same nervous energy with which he used to recite a theorem of
Euclid. He was father, too, of a couple of stout, curly-pated boys; and
his good woman, as he called her, appeared a sensible, honest,
good-natured lady. I must say that I envied him his wife much more than
I had envied my companion of the opera his Domine.
I happened only a little while ago to drop into the college chapel of a
Sunday. There were the same hard oak benches below, and the lucky
fellows who enjoyed a corner seat were leaning back upon the rail, after
the old fashion. The tutors were perched up in their side boxes, looking
as prim and serious and important as ever. The same stout doctor read
the hymn in the same rhythmical way; and he prayed the same prayer for
(I thought) the same old sort of sinners. As I shut my eyes to listen,
it seemed as if the intermediate years had all gone out, and that I was
on my own pew bench, and thinking out those little schemes for excuses,
or for effort, which were to relieve me, or to advance me, in my college
world.
There was a pleasure, like the pleasure of dreaming about forgotten
joys, in listening to the doctor’s sermon; he began in the same half
embarrassed, half awkward way, and fumbled at his Bible leaves, and the
poor pinched cushion, as he did long before. But as he went on with his
rusty and polemic vigor, the poetry within him would now and then warm
his soul into a burst of fervid eloquence, and his face would glow and
his hand tremble, and the cushion and the Bible leaves be all forgot, in
the glow of his thought, until, with a half cough and a pinch at the
cushion, he fell back into his strong but tread-mill argumentation.
In the corner above was the stately, white-haired professor, wearing the
old dignity of carriage, and a smile as bland as if the years had all
been playthings; and had I seen him in his lecture-room, I daresay I
should have found the same suavity of address, the same marvelous
currency of talk, and the same infinite composure over the exploding
retorts.
Near him was the silver-haired old gentleman—with a very astute
expression—who used to have an odd habit of tightening his cloak about
his nether limbs. I could not see that his eye was any the less bright;
nor did he seem less eager to catch at the handle of some witticism or
bit of satire—to the poor student’s cost. I remembered my old awe of
him, I must say, with something of a grudge; but I had got fairly over
it now. There are sharper griefs in life than a professor’s talk.
Farther on, I saw the long-faced, dark-haired man who looked as if he
were always near some explosive, electric battery, or upon an insulated
stool. He was, I believe, a man of fine feelings; but he had a way of
reducing all action to dry, hard, mathematical system, with very little
poetry about it. I know there was not much poetry in his problems in
physics, and still less in his half-yearly examinations. But I do not
dread them now.
Over opposite, I was glad to see still the aged head of the kind and
generous old man who in my day presided over the college, and who
carried with him the affections of each succeeding class—added to their
respect for his learning. This seems a higher triumph to me now than it
seemed then. A strong mind, or a cultivated mind, may challenge respect;
but there is needed a noble one to win affection.
A new man now filled his place in the president’s seat, but he was one
whom I had known and been proud to know. His figure was bent and
thin—the very figure that an old Flemish master would have chosen for a
scholar. His eye had a kind of piercing luster, as if it had long been
fixed on books; and his expression—when unrelieved by his affable
smile—was that of hard midnight toil. With all his polish of mind, he
was a gentleman at heart, and treated us always with a manly courtesy
that is not forgotten.
But of all the faces that used to be ranged below—four hundred men and
boys—there was not one with whom to join hands and live back again.
Their griefs, joy and toil were chaining them to their labor of life.
Each one in his thought coursing over a world as wide as my own—how many
thousand worlds of thought upon this one world of ours!
I stepped dreamily through the corridors of the old Atheneum, thinking
of that first fearful step, when the faces were new and the stern tutor
was strange, and the prolix Livy _so_ hard. I went up at night, and
skulked around the buildings when the lights were blazing from all the
windows, and they were busy with their tasks—plain tasks, and easy
tasks—because they are certain tasks. Happy fellows—thought I—who have
only to do what is set before you to be done. But the time is coming,
and very fast, when you must not only do, but know what to do. The time
is coming when, in place of your one master, you will have a thousand
masters—masters of duty, of business, of pleasure, and of grief—giving
you harder lessons, each one of them, than any of your Fluxions.
MORNING will pass, and the NOON will come—hot and scorching.
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