Chapter 7

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.

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.