University of Virginia Library

ELI IN TEARS.

I was very much amused and instructed. I wanted to stay
with them forever. It did me good to sit at the fountain of wisdom,
to drink in a perpetual flow of soul, and to feast on reason
I felt that my early education had been neglected—that I had
read Homer and Virgil in vain—that when I was standing in
Moscow and in the dazzling court of St. Petersburg, it were better
had I been in the whirl of the Fort Hamilton round-dances—at
the Branch—on Avenue V, reading society newspapers. O! I
sigh, in the anguish of my heart,—would that I had directed my
education in other channels—would that every book was in the
middle of the sea—would that art and architecture had not drawn
me aside from the festive dance—would that the palaces of the
Cæsars, the Milan cathedrals, the ruins of Keckler, and the great
dome of St. Paul's were in chaos! Would that Dickens and Ruskin
and Humboldt, and old Hugh Miller had never lived—and that
the coloring of Rembrandt and Raphael and Rubens had
gone out like the colors of a rainbow! How will it profit a man
if he gains the whole world—and fails to dance the German?
After death, comes the judgment. How can I die without learning
to dance the round-dances? I am a hopeless, ruined man.
I have cultivated my brain, while my heels have rested idly in
my boots. I can write—I have made a book—I can demonstrate
the XXXVI of Euclid, but I cannot dance the “dip!” May
the Lord have mercy on me, and not utterly cast me off because
I have not learned these things. Amen!

So I went on