University of Virginia Library

3. PART III.
A DIGRESSION.

It was a September night at the University. On
the morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the
winner of the first honours of my year. I was the
envy—the admiration—in some degree the wonder,

of the collegiate town in which the University stands
for I had commenced my career as the idlest and
most riotous of freshmen. What it was that had suddenly
made me enamoured of my chambers and my
books—that had saddened my manners and softened
my voice—that had given me a disgust to champagne
and my old allies, in favour of cold water and the
Platonists—that, in short, had metamorphosed, as
Bob Wilding would have said, a gentleman-like rake
and vau-rien into so dull a thing as an exemplary
academician—was past the divining of most of my
acquaintances. Oh, once-loved Edith! hast thou
any inkling in thy downward metempsychosis of the
philosophy of this marvel?

If you were to set a poet to make a town, with carte
blanche as to trees, gardens, and green blinds, he
would probably turn out very much such a place as
New-Haven. (Supposing your education in geography
to have been neglected, dear reader, this is
the second capital of Connecticut, a half-rural, half-metropolitan
town, lying between a precipice that
makes the fag-end of the Green Mountains and a
handsome bay in Long-Island Sound.) The first
thought of the inventor of New-Haven was to lay out
the streets in parallelograms, and the second was to
plant them from suburb to water-side with the magnificent
elms of the country. The result is, that at the
end of fifty years, the town is buried in leaves. If it
were not for the spires of the churches, a bird flying
over on his autumn voyage to the Floridas would
never mention having seen it in his travels. It is a
glorious tree, the elm—and those of the place I speak
of are famous, even in our land of trees, for their
surprising size and beauty. With the curve of their
stems in the sky, the long weepers of their outer and
lower branches drop into the street, fanning your

face as you pass under with their geranium-like leaves;
and close overhead, interwoven like the trellice of a
vine, they break up the light of the sky into golden
flecks, and make you, of the common highway, a
bower of the most approved secludedness and beauty.
The houses are something between an Italian palace
and an English cottage—built of wood, but, in the
dim light of those overshadowing trees, as fair to the
eye as marble with their triennial coats of paint; and
each stands in the midst of its own encircling grass-plot,
half buried in vines and flowers, and facing
outward from a cluster of gardens divided by slender
palings, and filling up with fruit-trees and summerhouses
the square on whose limit it stands. Then,
like the vari-coloured parallelograms upon a chessboard,
green openings are left throughout the town,
fringed with triple and interweaving elm-rows, the
long and weeping branches sweeping downward to
the grass, and with their enclosing shadows keeping
moist and cool the road they overhang; and fair
forms (it is the garden of American beauty—New-Haven)
flit about in the green light in primitive security
and freedom, and you would think the place, if
you alit upon it in a summer's evening—what it seems
to me now in memory, and what I have made it in
this Rosa-Matilda description—a scene from Boccaccio,
or a vision from long-lost Arcady.

New-Haven may have eight thousand inhabitants.
Its steamers run to New-York in six hours (or did in
my time—I have ceased to be astonished on that subject,
and should not wonder if they did it now in one
—a trifle of seventy miles up the Sound,) and the
ladies go up in the morning for a yard of bobbin and
return at night, and the gentlemen the same for a
stroll in Broadway; and it is to this circumstance
that, while it preserves its rural exterior, it is a very

metropolitan place in the character of its society.
The Amaryllis of the petty cottage you admire wears
the fashion twenty days from Paris, and her shepherd
has a coat from Nugee, the divine peculiarity of
which is not yet suspected east of Bond-street; and, in
the newspaper hanging half out of the window, there
is news, red-hot with the velocity of its arrival, from
Russia and the Rocky Mountains, from the sources of
the Mississippi and the brain of Monsieur Herbault.
Distance is an imaginary quantity, and Time, that
used to give every thing the go-by, has come to a
stand-still in his astonishment. There will be a proposition
in Congress ere long to do without him altogether—every
new thing “saves time” so marvellously.

Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma Mater,
however, and gaily as I describe it, it is to me, if I may
so express it, a picture of memory glazed and put
away; if I see it ever again, it will be but to walk
through its embowered streets by a midnight moon.
It is vain and heart-breaking to go back, after absence,
to any spot of earth of which the interest was the human
love whose home and cradle it had been. But
there is a period in our lives when the heart fuses and
compounds with the things about it, and the close
enamel with which it overruns and binds in the affections,
and which hardens in the lapse of years till the
immortal germ within is not more durable and unwasting,
warms never again, nor softens; and there
is nothing on earth so mournful and unavailing as to
return to the scenes which are unchanged, and look
to return to ourselves and others as we were when we
thus knew them.

Yet we think (I judge you by my own soul, gentle
reader,) that it is others—not we—who are changed!
We meet the friend that we loved in our youth, and

it is ever he who is cold and altered! We take the
hand that we bent over with our passionate kisses in
boyhood, and our raining tears when we last parted,
and it is ever hers that returns not the pressure and
her eyes, and not ours—oh, not ours!—that look back
the moistened and once familiar regard with a dry lid
and a gaze of stone! Oh God! it is ever he,—the
friend you have worshipped,—for whom you would
have died,—who gives you the tips of his fingers, and
greets you with a phrase of fashion, when you would
rush into his bosom and break your heart with weeping
out the imprisoned tenderness of years! I could
carve out the heart from my bosom, and fling it with
a malison into the sea, when I think how utterly and
worse than useless it is in this world of mocking
names! Yet “love” and “friendship” are words that
read well. You could scarce spare them in poetry.

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 holiday 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 megnetized 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 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 day-light—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 clinging 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.

3. III.

I was strolling on through one of the most fashionable
and romantic streets (when did these two words
ever before find themselves in a sentence together?)
when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar,
lit, unlike most others on that bright night, by a suspended
lamp, and crowded with company, attracted
my attention for a moment. Between the house and
the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a
white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion
to the low windows without concealing them from the
passer-by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, I
unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into
the rooms. It was the residence of a magnificent
girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut
beauty—a singular instance in America of what is
called in England a fine woman. (With us that word
applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large
as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters
have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She
was a “book of beauty” printed with virgin type;
and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all
my life been trying to express—that some women
seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to
others who seem mortal réchauffes—as if every limb
and feature had been used, and got out of shape in
some other person's service. The lady I speak of
looked new—and her name was Isidora.

She was standing just under the lamp, with a single
rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb
of a classmate of mine with evident pleasure.
She was a great fool, (did I mention that before?)
but weak, and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she
was, Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor
Psyche (soit elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly

graceful. Loveliness and fascination came to
her as dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she
obeyed her instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly,
and without design, the loveliest thing in nature. I
do not see, for my part, why all women should not
be so. They are as useful as flowers; they perpetuate
our species.

I was looking at her with irresistible admiration,
when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree,
and my chum, monster, and ally, Job Smith, (of
whom I have before spoken in these historical papers,)
laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Do you know, my dear Job,” I said, in a solemn
tone of admonition, “that blind John was imprisoned
for looking into people's windows?”

But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The
light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more
haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I
never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had
loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our
sight, since his first year in college; but that it would
ever so master him, or that he could link his monstrous
deformity, even in thought, with that radiant
vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as probable
as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere
the moon that kissed Endymion.

“I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever
since you left me,” said he. (We had parted three
hours before, at twilight.)

“And why not go in, in the name of common
sense?”

“Oh! God, Phil!—with this demon in my heart?
Can you see my face in this light?”

It was too true! he would have frightened the
household gods from their pedestals.

“But what would you do, my dear Job? Why

come here to madden yourself with a sight you must
have known you would see?”

“Phil?”

“What, my dear boy?”

“Will you do me a kindness?”

“Certainly.”

“Isidora would do any thing you wished her to do.”

“Um! with a reservation, my dear chum!”

“But she would give you the rose that is in her
hair.”

“Without a doubt.”

“And for me—if you told her it was for me.
Would she not?”

“Perhaps. But will that content you?”

“It will soften my despair. I will never look on
her face more; but I should like my last sight of her
to be associated with kindness?”

Poor Job! how true it is that “affection is a fire
which kindleth as well in the bramble as in the oak,
and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it
may best burn.” I do believe in my heart that the soul
in thee was designed for a presentable body—thy instincts
were so invariably mistaken. When didst
thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it
did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by
conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying similitude
it was that was written on every blank page in
thy Lexicon: “Larks that mount in the air, build
their nests below in the earth; and women that cast
their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon
vassals.” Appelles must have been better looking
than Alexander, when Campaspe said that!

As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to
break any three of the commandments in your service,
but you should hesitate to require of friendship a violation
of etiquette. I was in a round jacket and boots, and

it was a dress evening throughout New-Haven. I
looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me to
enter a soirée upon his errand, and passed my thumb
and finger around the edge of my white jacket; but I
loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for the
same reason, with a difference—the imperishable wellspring
he carried in his heart through the desert of the
world, and which I well knew he would give up his
life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal whose
construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably resembled.
When I hesitated, and looked down at my
boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse to
evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to
beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my
request. If she had been a woman of sense, I should
have had no difficulty; but it requires caution and
skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool.

“Would not the rose do as well,” said I, in desperate
embarrassment, “if she does not know that it is for
you, my dear Job?” It would have been very easy to
have asked for it for myself.

Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not
comprehend the pang my proposition gave him.

“Away prop, and down, scaffold,” thought I, as I
gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door.

“Mr. Slingsby,” announced the servant.

“Mr. Slingsby?” inquired the mistress of the house,
seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the
hall.

“Mr. Slingsby!!!” cried out twenty voices in
amazement, as I stepped over the threshhold into the
light.

It has happened since the days of Thebet Ben Khorat,
that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was
evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all
present. (I should observe, that in those days, I

relished rather of dandyism.) As I read the suspicion
in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went
straight up to Miss Higgins, and, sotto voce, asked her
to take a turn with me in the garden.

“Isidora,” I said, “I have long known your superiority
of mind,” (when you want any thing of a woman,
praise her for that in which she is most deficient,
says La Bruyère,) “and I have great occasion to rely
on it in the request I am about to make of you.”

She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravel-walk
with heightened majesty. I had not had occasion
to pay her a compliment before since my freshman
year.

“What is it, Mr. Slingsby?”

“You know Smith—my chum.”

“Certainly.”

“I have just come from him.”

“Well!”

“He is gone mad!”

“Mad! Mr. Slingsby?”

“Stark and furious!”

“Gracious goodness!”

“And all for you!”

“For me!!”

“For you!” I thought her great blue eyes would
have become what they call in America “sot,” at this
astounding communication.

“Now, Miss Higgins,” I continued, “pray listen;
my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular
strength, that seven men cannot hold him.”

“Gracious!”

“And he has broken away, and is here at your door.”

“Good gracious!”

“Don't be afraid! He is as gentle as a kitten when
I am present. And now hear my request.—He leaves
town to-morrow, as you well know, not to return. I

shall take him home to Vermont with keepers. He is
bent upon one thing, and in that you must humour
him.”

Miss Higgins began to be alarmed.

“He has looked through the window and seen you
with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his
madness, of your love, he says, that if you would give
him that rose with a kind word, and a farewell, he
should be happy. You will do it, will you not?”

“Dear me! I should be so afraid to speak to him!”

“But will you? and I'll tell you what to say.”

Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and I passed
ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which,
with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded
like the most interesting thing in the world. I left her
in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and returned
to Job.

“You have come without it!” said the despairing
lover, falling back against the tree.

“Miss Higgins's compliments, and begs you will go
round by the gate, and meet her in the summer-house.
She prefers to manage her own affairs.”

“Good God! are you mocking me?”

“I will accompany you, my dear boy.”

There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness
in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together,
whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in
the world, the most generous, the most diffident of itself,
yet the most self-sacrificing and delicate, was at
the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate
abandonment for a flower and a kind word; and she,
a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of
kindness of which she could not comprehend the meaning
or the worth, but which was to be garnered up by
that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid him
for years of unrequited affection! She recited it really

very well. I stood at the latticed door, and interrupted
them the instant there was a pause in the dialogue;
and getting Job away as fast as possible, I left Miss
Higgins with a promise of secrecy, and resumed my
midnight stroll.

Apropos—among Job's letters is a copy of verses
which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think
were written on this very occasion.

If Job had rejoiced in a more euphonous name, I
should have bought a criticism in some review, and
started him fairly as a poet. But “Job Smith!”—
“Poems by Job Smith!”—It would never do! If he
wrote like a seraph, and printed the book at his own
expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown
to each person that would take one away, the critics
would damn him all the same! Really one's father
and mother have a great deal to answer for!

But Job is a poet who should have lived in the
middle ages, no less for the convenience of the nom
ne guerre, fashionable in those days, than because
his poetry, being chiefly the mixed product of feeling
and courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule.
The philosophical and iron-wire poetry of our day
stands an attack like a fortification, and comes down
upon the besieger with reason and logic as good as his
own. But the more delicate offspring of tenderness
and chivalry, intending no violence, and venturing
out to sea upon a rose-leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond
diving-bells by half a breath of scorn. I would
subscribe liberally myself to a private press and a
court of honour in poetry—critics, if admitted, to be
dumb upon a penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce
act upon this hint? Poets now-a-days are more
slaves and felons than your African, or your culprit
at the old Bailey!

I would go a great way, privately, to find a genuine
spark of chivalry, and Job lit his every-day lamp with
it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these
verses, which I copied long ago from a lady's album.
Yet, you may ridicule them if you like!

I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader;
for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was
worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is
a little touch of his quality:—

I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I
have no idea why I have digressed this time from the
story which (you may see by the motto at the beginning
of the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive
easily how people, who have nothing to do, betake
themselves to autobiography—it is so pleasant
rambling about over the past and regathering only
the flowers. Why should pain and mortification be

unsepultured? The world is no wiser for these written
experiences. “The best book,” said Southey,
“does but little good to the world, and much harm to
the author.” I shall deliberate whether to enlighten
the world as to Edith's metempsychosis, or no.