2. II.
It was, as I have said, a moonlight night of unparalleled
splendor. The morrow was the college anniversary
— the day of the departure of the senior class
— and the town, which is, as it were, a part of the university,
was in the usual tumult of the gayest and
saddest evening of the year. The night was warm,
and the houses, of which the drawing-rooms are all
on a level with the gardens in the rear, and through
which a long hall stretches like a ball-room, were
thrown open, doors and windows, and the thousand
students of the university, and the crowds of their
friends, and the hosts of strangers drawn to the place
at this season by the annual festivities, and the families,
every one with a troop of daughters (as the leaves
on our trees, compared with those of old countries —
three to one — so are our sons and daughters) were all
sitting without lamps in the moon-lit rooms, or strolling
together, lovers and friends, in the fragrant gardens,
or looking out upon the street, returning the
greetings of the passers-by, or, with heads uncovered,
pacing backward and forward beneath the elms before
the door — the whole scene one that the angels in
heaven might make a holyday to see.
There were a hundred of my fellow-seniors — young
men of from eighteen to twenty-four — every one of
whom was passing the last evening of the four most
impressible and attaching years of his life, with the
family in which he had been most intimate, in a town
where refinement and education had done their utmost
upon the society, and which was renowned
throughout America for the extraordinary beauty of
its women. They had come from every state in the
Union, and the Georgian and the Vermontese, the
Kentuckian and the Virginian, were to start alike on
the morrow-night with a lengthening chain for home,
each bearing away the hearts he had attached to him
(one or more!) and leaving his own, till, like the magnetized
needle, it should drop away with the weakened
attraction; and there was probably but one that
night in the departing troop who was not whispering
in some throbbing ear the passionate but vain and
mocking avowal of fidelity in love! And yet I had
had my attachments too; and there was scarce a
house in that leafy and murmuring paradise of friendship
and trees, that would not have hailed me with
acclamation had I entered the door; and I make this
record of kindness and hospitality (unforgotten after
long years of vicissitude and travel), with the hope
that there may yet live some memory as constant as
mine, and that some eye will read it with a warmth in
its lid, and some lip — some one at least — murmur, “I
remember him!” There are trees in that town whose
drooping leaves I could press to my lips with an affection
as passionate as if they were human, though the
lips and voices that have endeared them to me are as
changed as the foliage upon the branch, and would
recognise my love as coldly.
There was one, I say, who walked the thronged
pavement alone that night, or but with such company
as Uhland's;[2]
yet the heart of that solitary senior was
far from lonely. The palm of years of ambition was
in his grasp — the reward of daily self-denial and midnight
watching — the prize of a straining mind and
a yearning desire; and there was not one of the many
who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms,
either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its attainment,
who had the shadow of an idea what spirit
sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common is
this ignorance of human motives! How distant, and
slight, and unsuspected, are the springs often of the
most desperate achievement! How little the world
knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the
politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life!
And how insignificant and unequal to the result would
seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back
from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty
they have waked and exhausted! It is a startling
thing to question even your own soul for its motive.
Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one you are surprised at
the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this
sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and,
as I live, the face that is conjured up at my bidding is
of one of whom I have not had a definite thought for
years. I would lay my life she thinks at this instant
I have forgotten her very name. Yet I know she
will read this page with an interest no other could
awaken, striving to trace in it the changes that have
come over me since we parted. I know (and I knew
then, though we never exchanged a word save in
friendship), that she devoted her innermost soul when
we strayed together by that wild river in the West
(dost thou remember it, dear friend? for now I speak
to thee!) to the study of a mind and character of which
she thought better than the world or their possessor;
and I know — oh, how
well I know! — that with husband
and children around her, whom she loves and
to whom she is devoted, the memory of me is laid
away in her heart like a fond but incomplete dream
of what once seemed possible — the feeling with which
the mother looks on her witless boy, and loves him
more for what he
might have been, than his brothers
for what they
are!
I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this
improvista digression (for, like “Opportunity and the
Hours,” I “never look back;”[3]
) but let us return to
the shadow of the thousand elms of New Haven.
The Gascon thought his own thunder and lightning
superior to that of other countries, but I must run the
hazard of your incredulity as well, in preferring an
American moon. In Greece and Asia Minor, perhaps
(ragione — she was first worshipped there), Cytheris
shines as brightly; but the Ephesian of Connecticut
sees the flaws upon the pearly buckler of the goddess,
as does the habitant of no other clime. His eye lies
close to the moon. There is no film, and no visible
beam in the clarified atmosphere. Her light is less
an emanation than a presence — the difference between
the water in a thunder-shower and the depths of
the sea. The moon struggles to you in England —
she is all about you, like an element of the air, in
America.
The night was breathless, and the fragmented light
lay on the pavement in motionless stars, as clear and
definite in their edges as if the “patines of bright gold”
had dropped through the trees, and lay glittering beneath
my feet. There was a kind of darkness visible
in the streets, overshadowed as they were by the massy
and leaf-burthened elms, and as I looked through the
houses, standing in obscurity myself, the gardens
seemed full of daylight — the unobstructed moon
poured with such a flood of radiance on the flowery
alleys within, and their gay troops of promenaders.
And as I distinguished one and another familiar friend,
with a form as familiar clining to his side, and, with
drooping head and faltering step, listening or replying
(I well knew), to the avowals of love and truth, I murmured
in thought to my own far away, but never-forgotten
Edith, a vow as deep — ay, deeper than theirs,
as my spirit and hers had been sounded by the profounder
plummet of sorrow and separation. How the
very moonlight — how the stars of heaven — how the
balm in the air, and the languor of summer night in
my indolent frame, seemed, in those hours of loneliness,
ministers at the passionate altar-fires of my love!
Forsworn and treacherous Edith! do I live to write
this for thine eye?
I linger upon these trifles of the past — these hours
for which I would have borrowed wings when they
were here — and, as then they seemed but the flowering
promise of happiness, they seem now like the fruit,
enjoyed and departed. Past and future bliss there
would seem to be in the world — knows any one of
such a commodity in the present? I have not seen
it in my travels.
