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 honors of my year. I was the envy — the
admiration — in some degree the wonder, of the col
legiate 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 enamored 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 favor 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! has 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-colored 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 Boccacio, 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
Armaryllis 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 everything 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 gayly 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 even 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 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.

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 anything 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.” Apelles 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
well-spring 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 threshold 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 anything 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 gravelwalk
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 can not 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 humor
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, failing back against the tree.

“Miss Higgins' 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 euphonious 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 de
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 honor
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 Sonthey, “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.