 | MORNING, NOON, AND EVENING. Reveries of a bachelor, or, A book of the heart |  |
College.
School-mates 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 the charm, and you
find only—another man.
But with your classmates, in that later school,
where form and character were both nearer ripeness,
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
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 Persilipo. 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
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 Room,
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 gaiety of the
scene about us, until day-light 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 Domino.
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,
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 vigour, 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
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
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
lustre, 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, joys, 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—
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.
| MORNING, NOON, AND EVENING. Reveries of a bachelor, or, A book of the heart | |