University of Virginia Library

REMINISCENCES OF OUR CLASS IN
COLLEGE.

That is a torn chaplet from the festive wreath, which thou,
dear Doctor Bill T—, didst fling upon the altar of our affections,
on that roysterous night, when we solemnized a
wake over the corpse of the class of eighteen hundred and—
blank. The smoke of the incense of the altar went up gloriously.

It was a melancholy, frolicksome, mad symposium. Commencement
was ended. The speeches had been spoken.
The berries and the leaves of the bacca-laureation had been
plucked. Each ingenuous youth had got his due share of
“tu vero videas, probe te geras,”[1] to start him ahead upon his
journey through this world of trouble. The attentive audience
had been dismissed with thanks for their civil behavior,

and a benediction in Latin. We were let loose to seek
our fortunes. The blessing of our Alma Mater was fresh
upon our heads, the memory of the happy days we had labored
in her household was green and bitter in our hearts.
We had her best recommendation for sobriety, honesty, and
extensive capacity, in our pockets. “Optimæ spei juvenis,”[2]
was wreathed around our brows. We were proud, and humbled,
happy and wretched. The new sense of boyhood gone,
and manhood begun, of not understood independence, crazed
us. We walked on stilts.—We felt the earth pressing down
upon us as on a clod.—We were newly married.—We had
lost our mother.—The tie was severed.—We were turned
out of house and home.—We should never be called before
the board again.—We had been torn from the breasts of our
beautiful nurse, and from the blessed fountains whence we
had been accustomed to suck our daily milk of Greek particles,
and conic sections, and were thrown into the streets to make
room for a new set of brats whom the professors had been
lately getting! We were collegians no more! Good bye,
black silk gown. Good bye, old trees. Good bye, bell.
Good bye, janitor. But not yet had we said, Good bye, fellows.
A very afflicting valediction had been pronounced for
us, in the church, it is true, and much tears were talked of,
by a speaker appointed by the board. But that appointment
was not ours, and the pathos reached the hearts of other
classes than the senior. Our valedictory orators pronounced,
and sung, their valete, at Kensington House, where our parting
supper was spread. We were all orators, and poets too,
that night. But chiefly thee, Dear Doc, did Anacreon fill
full of inspiration. Why wert thou at the foot of thy class,
O thou Son of Song!

The declared estimate of merit of boy students does not
always stellate either the honesty, or discrimination of the
judges. I do not say this out of bad spite because I carried
away none of the honors. My vexation is that such excellent
merit as the Doctor's should have borne off what is next
to disgrace. But no matter, dear Bill; thou wert up head in
our love; and it is better to have warm, full hearts, without
honors, than a cold, empty honor without a share in your
classmates affections. Remember, too, that gigantic Dr.
Mitchell was accounted worthy to be graduated in an equal
rank. And thou wert comforted with the companionship of
Junius T—, and Jack T—, forming with thee, a goodly
musical T. party; all since, solemn medical doctors. Jun.
and Jack, alas! breathe no more the atmosphere of this earth.
They are with the school-fellows of Justice Silence. Years
since, ye died, boys, in your yet unexhausted adolescence.
Pax vobiscum! How many of us are left? Let us call the
roll, and see.

Shall we call the roll of the dead, and demand our friends
from the grave? Aye! let us bring back the old college
chapel, and the familiar lecture-rooms, and the healthy youth
that defied mortality with its well-knit muscles, and the sport
and the loves of boy enthusiasm. Classmates, come! Attention
to the calling of the roll! ADSUM is the word.

Harry P.!—Harry P.!—Thou wert at the head of thy
class worthily. But thou answerest not now to thy name
called. Thy place is empty, and we must mark thee “absent.”
O sorrow! not for thee, but for us who mourn so much genius
and virtue lost to us!

Noble, magnanimous, proud Harry! A boy patriot, stately,
exclusive, jealous of his right of citizenship, heir of a rich
estate, distrustful of the common herd, hater of Irishmen!

He worshipped Hamilton. But the grave holds him now,
whom the Senate-house expected;—his body only, not his
fame. Death, not Oblivion, has triumphed. Before the Destroyer
came he honored his country, and kissed the soil of
Greece dear to him for his love of her heroes and philosophers.
He comforted blood-stained Marathon, and, danger-daring,
dealt out the charities of his country to the suffering
islands of the ægean. The Turk cursed him, and the bread
which he brought to the lips of the daughters of Pindar and
Demosthenes.

Harry wrote his travels and experience. But he was
modest, and he did not write for lucre, eking out his landlord's
rent by “inklings” spattered from a bitten pen. No printer's
devils, bought with unknown clean shirt-collars, extolled the
praise of his unaffected story. His book knew no puffs, and
has been only a thing to steal from. But he is honored where
his spirit would have sought honor, and it matters not that the
million of ladies'—weekly—miscellanies never had communion
with his spirit.

Bill J.—No. 2, answers “here,” and we give hearty thanks
for the hope that some good fellows are left to us. Three
years and a half did studious, always prepared Billy, wear the
crowning laurels of laborious desert; but he laughed, one day,
out of season, during the senior year, and “alter,”—Harry,—
“tulit honores.” He was saved the necessity of writing a
salutatory in Latin—he abjured the past, and the present, and
consoled himself with a poem on “the pleasures of anticipation.”
It is a thing to be recorded and rejoiced at, that his
anticipations were bright, and better yet, that they have not
been fashions of deceitful fancy. The purest ermine on his
neck, gives ample vouchers for his acknowledged excellence.

Bill is the same Bill yet;—simple, but wise;—unpretending,

but learned;—single-hearted,—guile never knew him, nor
uneasy envy. To do what would make him happy,—that
was his only exertion; and he never was happy, but in doing
good, or in helping along some piece of doubtful evil which
was needful for the comfort of his friends. You cannot provoke
him, nor make him jealous. He looked sorrowful for
only two minutes, when he heard the annunciation of his lost
first honor. It would not grieve him now, to be defeated by
one vote, in a contest for a seat in Congress. Put Woodfall
and the Revised Statutes under his arm, and he is the same
boy that he was when he went down Park Place, hugging
Euclid, Vince, and Greca Majora.

Next—next—next;——I never did exactly comprehend
the adjustment of the honors of scholarship in our class;—but
next, I believe, comes the Vale—dictator—I stand by that
word. It means a dictator appointed by the board of professors,
to take care that the boys bid each other good-bye before
the ladies and gentlemen, according to the forms of the bye-laws
of the college, for that purpose duly established and enacted.

I have forgiven thee, O careful minder of rules and regulations,
obedient, good boy; and I love thee, now, moderately.
Yet it was a pity, that, of all the class, thou only wert present
on that morning when I was doomed to read, in the chapel,
after prayers, before the assembled college, with crocodile
penitence, a sorrowful admission of the enormity of my adjudged
iniquity, and to exalt the merciful mildness of the retribution!
Thy presence spoiled the oneness of the effect.
The freshmen, too, might have mistaken thee for the culprit,
or coupled thee with me, miserable as a joint transgressor.
But the offence was not very rank, and they could not have
held thee disgraced. I protest that that punishment was cruel

and unusual. So thought my classmates; and I being ignorant,
and utterly innocent of conspiracy, they resolved to be
absent on the morning of the execution.[3]

God bless their noble souls! Only thou wert there, sitting
with meekness and sweet humility, and pitying, doubtless,
those bad young men who imposed it upon thee to represent the
virtue of the class, and to reap the meed of the contrast of thy
good behavior;—like Hogarth's good apprentice, who married
his master's daughter, and got the estates and honors of
the family.

Verily, good boys shall have their reward. Prosperity
shall still follow thee, O my friend!—assiduous, watchful, vain,
subtle, obsequious to the People,—the People shall yet own
thee for a mighty man to get office from them.

Let us go on with the roll. P. M. is called and comes;
and we clasp to our bosom the spirit of poetry and the soul of
friendship. He was the favorite of the class, the prized and
admired. What sensibility of criticism, or what instability of
purpose, dearest P., deprives the class of the honor of thy
name, long since by heaven decreed to be celebrated for
mighty genius.

By his side, coming with modest steps, approaches amiable
Stephen H. His thin form, pale cheek, light blue eye,—his
pleasantly smiling, half opened lips, disclosing small brilliantly
white teeth, are familiar and welcome as heretofore. Only
he is older, and there is a cast of care upon his brow, deeper,

and half melancholy. Happy is that village church which
owns him for her pastor.

Next, jolly I. F. dashes to his place, and we greet his rosy
face with the well-remembered joy of old times. He first
gave his heart to the study of the decisions of Courts that have
powers to overrule the established fashions of other brother
and sister tribunals, and which are commonly called “Law;”
but soon, and wisely, determined that the whole race of Bracton
and Britton were unprofitable company; and now he
draws a revenue from rum, sugar and molasses. Mark him
“present” with a whole heart.

Bill B. cannot speak. Consumption wasted away him,
beloved both by the professors and his fellow-pupils. Weep
not. It is the common lot. We have all got to go soon.
Call on.

J. S. gives an uncertain sound. His voice is as the voice
of a ghost, or else as of a schoolmaster buried alive in the far
west. I know not how to mark him.

Good-hearted S. O., too. He left his country, and pursued
the lucre of merchandize in a foreign land. Does the sunny
sky, or the cold earth of the churchyard canopy his head.
He is absent without excuse.

H. J., solemn and dignified for a little fellow, wears a bishop's
cassock, and seems to censure the freedom with which
we summon old associates; but he takes his seat and submits
to our invocation.

G. W. flourishes with the scalpel and lancet. Impatient
haste draws him to his patients. We must let him depart.
He is one of the friends to whom we might give authority in
an extreme case to cut us, but then, only professionally.

G. H. ministers to the reformed Dutch in a pleasant town
in Jersey. When I saw him last, some years ago, he

had given proof of his power of persuasion, by inducing a
prime lamb of his flock to become his spouse; and she had
given fruitful evidence of her attachment to the shepherd, in
the shape of half-a-dozen little lambkin boys and girls.

F. P. comes next, true gentleman, from his magnificent
manor, nor avoids a seat with his classmates, who always received
him open-armed. Goddess Fortune, when she smiled
upon him, took off her bandage and exercised good judgment.

G. G. rather majestic at some times, but always good-natured.
G. cries out a hearty “here.” He worshipped the
legal muses, and still officiates in their priesthood, speaking
oracles to clients, who, with just confidence, pay well for favorable
responses.

W. C. leaps into his place with a long bound;—he whom
we used to call “Amaryllis,”—with his soft, feminine cheek,
clear gentle eye, and beginning-to-grow downy chin. He was
famous for a quick moving foot, and was always chosen first
at foot-ball. I have to show a scar upon my knee, gained
from him upon the Battery, in the raging melee. The class
got through trigonometry while I was laid up, and that consoled
me. He plays now the serious games of “for that whereas,”
and “may it please your Honor.” The boy ball-player has
disappeared in the Counsellor of men.

The list is nearly through; Death has made sad havoc
below the middle of the class. There are left, besides, to
answer only W. M. and W. G., bred to the legal bar, but happily
independent upon that laborious profession;—and then,
dear Doctor Bill, and E. P., of unquestionable talent and laziness,
Nimrod of the class,—mighty feather scatterer. We
awarded to him the first honor in that department of science,
which comprises the theory of percutient bodies, and the composition
and resolution of forces and projectiles. That kind

of philosophy was truly natural to him—he was born to illustrate
it. I never knew a practical lecturer who, “the initial
velocity being given,” could better “find the direction in which
a body must be projected in order to hit a given point.” He
is high yet on some kind of “points,” and almost inimitable as
to “direction.”

Let us not forget C. E., honored with a diploma, causa favoris,
and the payment of the necessary fees;—nor simple
G. S., “commee,” as his name went. He was the jovial Andronicus
of the class, yet was sometimes pathetic, and read
compositions about “the streaming rivulet of consistency
which flows but to cement,” and other poetical melancholies
of the same tender spirit. Commee paid the fees, however,
and got his diploma. Money is a great blessing. Where the
boy is now the Lord knows. Mark him absent.

What horrid appetite of the grave has swallowed up the
rest of the three last grades! Little, hump-backed P. S., and
red-haired Tom K., and strong-passioned E. S., and thin J. L.,
torn from the church, and fat “Duck” W., and pale, innocent
shadow W. F., who answered to the sobriquet of “Sol Lob,”
and musical Jack T., with his ever-present companion Jun?
—Alas! boys—

—Shelley.

Stay! stay! stay! stay! I recall my invocation! Speak
not, I conjure you! Speak not! My heart is gone! I cannot
bear the solemn vision!

What fearful changes are produced by the revolution of a
few short years! We entered, a class of forty-seven. We

were graduated, a class of twenty-nine; of this number only
nineteen are surviving, counting some bachelors as existing
of whom I have no certain knowledge! It seems but as yesterday
that we were boys; and now we are mature men, clergymen,
physicians, lawyers, merchants, judges, legislators,
fathers in the Republic! It never occurred to me before that
I am getting old. It is time for me to repent and reform. Dr.
Wilson used to say that our class was the worst class that he
ever had to do with, and he was pleased to assure me upon one
occasion that I was the worst young “mon” in it. I wonder
whether I have improved any. But he did me injustice there,
I never threw a torpedo on the floor between the Doctor's
legs, merely to see him jump, nor did I ever let loose in the
lecture-room a mouse, or any other quadruped, as did some
sad boys with longer faces, and in better credit than myself.
I seriously affirm that my only guilt has been that of an accessory
after the fact, in laughing at the silly joke. Yet I had
not occasionally to suffer for imputed transgressions, as thou,
dear Doc., canst testify. But I never quarrelled with thee,
Doc., about that matter—and it is all over now. Let the
thing go.

Here I am! here I am! And what am I, that I am left to
write these reminiscences? Where is my recorded merit,
my service done to the church, or to my country, of which
this prolonged duration of life is the reward? Let me retire,
and give myself an examination. I am, I think, awakened.