2. II.
New Haven is not alone the seat of a university.
It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive
beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and
sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its central
position and accessibility, and the facilities for attending
the lectures of the college professors, render
it a most desirable place of instruction in every department.
Among others, the female schools of the
place have a great reputation, and this, which in Europe,
or with a European state of society, would
probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank
character of manners in America, a mutual and decided
advantage. The daughters of the first families
of the country are sent here, committed for two, three,
and four years, to the exclusive care of the head of
the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and
advantages of the school) associating freely with the
general society of the town, the male part, of course,
composed principally of students. A more easy and
liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world,
and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of
morals and manners so high and unexceptionable.
Attachments are often formed, and little harm is
thought of it; and unless it is a very strong case of
disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the
way of the common intercourse between lovers; and
the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman
senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and
marry — if they like. If they do not, the lady stands
as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the
gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by having
been on his knees.
Like “Le Noir Fainéant,” at the tournament, my
friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor
in the various pursuits of the university. A sudden
interference in a quarrel, in which a brother freshman
was contending against odds, enlightened the class as
to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted himself
at recitations with the air of self-contempt for
such easy excellence; he dressed plainly, but with
instinctive taste; and at the end of the first term,
having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with
his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought
with him from the west, he had acquired an ascendency
in the opinion of the class for which no one
could well account, but to which every one unhesitatingly
assented.
We returned after our first short vacation, and of
my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I
much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the
vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at
meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his
heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him.
By favor seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodging
in the town — the rest of the class being compelled
to live with a chum in the college buildings. I found
his rooms — (I was the first of the class who had entered
them) — more luxuriously furnished than I had
expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but
his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America
an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and
superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise.
How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra-civilization
in the forests of the west was a mystery
that remained to be solved.
