IV.
First Look at the World.
Our Clarence is now fairly afloat upon the swift tide of Youth. The thrall of teachers is ended, and the audacity of self-resolve is begun. It is not a little odd, that, when we have least strength to combat the world, we have the highest confidence in our ability.
Very few individuals in the world possess that happy consciousness of their own prowess which belongs to the newly-graduated collegian. He has most abounding faith in the tricksy panoply that he has wrought out of the metal of his Classics. His Mathematics, he has not a doubt, will solve for him every complexity of life's questions; and his Logic will as certainly untie all Gordian knots, whether in politics or ethics.
He has no idea of defeat; he proposes to take the world by storm; he half wonders that quiet people are not startled by his presence. He brushes with an air of importance about the halls of country hotels; he wears his honor at the public tables; he fancies that the inattentive guests can have little idea that the young gentleman, who so recently delighted the public ear with his dissertation on the "General Tendency of Opinion," is actually among them, and quietly eating from the same dish of beef and of pudding!
Our poor Clarence does not know—Heaven forbid he should!—that he is but little wiser now than when he turned his back upon the old Academy, with its gallipots and broken retorts; and that with the addition of a few Greek roots, a smattering of Latin, and some readiness of speech, he is almost as weak for breasting the strong current of life as when a boy. America is but a poor place for the romantic book-dreamer. The demands of this new, Western life of ours are practical and earnest. Prompt action, and ready tact, are the weapons by which to meet it, and subdue it. The education of the cloister offers at best only a sound starting-point from which to leap into the tide.
The father of Clarence is a cool, matter-of-fact man. He has little sympathy with any of the romantic notions that enthrall a youth of twenty. He has a very humble opinion—much humbler than you think he should have—of your attainments at college. He advises a short period of travel, that by observation you may find out more fully how that world is made up with which you are henceforth to struggle.
Your mother half fears your alienation from the affections of home. Her letters all run over with a tenderness that makes you sigh, and that makes you feel a deep reproach. You may not have been wanting in the more ordinary tokens of affection; you have made your periodic visits; but you blush for the consciousness that fastens on you of neglect at heart. You blush for the lack of that glow of feeling which once fastened to every home-object.
[Does a man indeed outgrow affections as his mind ripens? Do the early and tender sympathies become a part of his intellectual perceptions, to be appreciated and reasoned upon as one reasons about truths of science? Is their vitality necessarily young? Is there the same ripe, joyous burst of the heart at the recollection of later friendships, which belonged to those of boyhood; and are not the later ones more the suggestions of judgment, and less the absolute conditions of the heart's health?]
The letters of your mother, as I said, make you sigh: there is no moment in our lives when we feel less worthy of the love of others, and less worthy of our own respect, than when we receive evidences of kindness which we know we do not merit,—and when souls are laid bare to us, and we have too much indifference to lay bare our own in return.
"Clarence,"—writes that neglected mother,—"you do not know how much you are in our thoughts, and how often you are the burden of my prayers. Oh, Clarence, I could almost wish that you were still a boy,—still running to me for those little favors which I was only too happy to bestow,—still dependent in some degree on your mother's love for happiness.
"Perhaps I do you wrong, Clarence, but it does seem from the changing tone of your letters, that you are becoming more and more forgetful of us all; that you are feeling less need of our advice, and—what I feel far more deeply—less need of our affection. Do not, my son, forget the lessons of home. There will come a time, I feel sure, when you will know that those lessons are good. They may not indeed help you in that intellectual strife which soon will engross you; and they may not have fitted you to shine in what are called the brilliant circles of the world, but they are such, Clarence, as make the heart pure and honest and strong!
"You may think me weak to write you thus, as I would have written to my light-hearted boy years ago; indeed I am not strong, but growing every day more feeble.
"Nelly, your sweet sister, is sitting by me. 'Tell Clarence,' she says, 'to come home soon.' You know, my son, what hearty welcome will greet you; and that, whether here or away, our love and prayers will be with you always; and may God in his infinite mercy keep you from all harm!"
A tear or two—brushed away as soon as they come—is all that youth gives to embalm such treasure of love! A gay laugh, or the challenge of some companion of a day, will sweep away into the night the earnest, regretful, yet happy dreams that rise like incense from the pages of such hallowed affection.
The brusque world too is to be met, with all its hurry and promptitude. Manhood, in our swift American world, is measured too much by forgetfulness of all the sweet bonds which tie the heart to the home of its first attachments. We deaden the glow that nature has kindled, lest it may lighten our hearts into an enchanting flame of weakness. We have not learned to make that flame the beacon of our purposes and the warmer of our strength. We are men too early.
But an experience is approaching Clarence, that will drive his heart home for shelter, like a wounded bird!
----It is an autumn morning, with such crimson glories to kindle it as lie along the twin ranges of mountain that guard the Hudson. The white frosts shine like changing silk in the fields of late-growing clover; the river-mists curl, and idle along the bosom of the water, and creep up the hill-sides, and at noon float their feathery vapors aloft in clouds; the crimson trees blaze in the side valleys, and blend their vermilion tints under the fairy hands of our American frost-painters with the dark blood of the ash-trees and the orange-tinted oaks. Blue and bright under the clear Fall heaven, the broad river shines before the surging prow of the boat like a shield of steel.
The bracing air lights up rich dreams of life. Your fancy peoples the valleys and the hill-tops with its creations; and your hope lends some crowning beauty of the landscape to your dreamy future. The vision of your last college year is not gone. That figure, whose elegance your eyes then feasted on, still floats before you; and the memory of the last talk with Laura is as vivid as if it were only yesterday that you listened. Indeed this opening campaign of travel—although you are half ashamed to confess it to yourself—is guided by the thought of her.
Dalton with a party of friends, his sister among them, is journeying to the north. A hope of meeting them—scarce acknowledged as an intention—spurs you on. The eye rests dreamily and vaguely on the beauties that appear at every turn: they are beauties that charm you, and charm you the more by an indefinable association with that fairy object that floats before you, half unknown, and wholly unclaimed. The quiet towns with their noonday stillness, the out-lying mansions with their stately splendor, the bustling cities with their mocking din, and the long reaches of silent and wooded shore, chime with their several beauties to your heart, in keeping with the master-key that was touched long weeks before.
The cool, honest advices of the father drift across your memory in shadowy forms, as you wander through the streets of the first northern cities; and all the need for observation, and the incentives to purpose, which your ambitious designs would once have quickened, fade dismally when you find that she is not there. All the lax gayety of Saratoga palls on the appetite; even the magnificent shores of Lake George, though stirring your spirit to an insensible wonder and love, do not cheat you into a trance that lingers. In vain the sun blazons every isle, and lights every shaded cove, and at evening stretches the Black Mountain in giant slumber on the waters.
Your thought bounds away from the beauty of sky and lake, and fastens upon the ideal which your dreamy humors cherish. The very glow of pursuit heightens your fervor,—a fervor that dims sadly the new-wakened memories of home. The southern gates of Champlain, those fir-draped Trosachs of America, are passed, and you find yourself, upon a golden evening of Canadian autumn, in the quaint old city of Montreal.
Dalton with his party has gone down to Quebec. He is to return within a few days on his way to Niagara. There is a letter from Nelly awaiting you. It says:—"Mother is much more feeble: she often speaks of your return in a way that I am sure, if you heard, Clarence, would bring you back to us soon."
There is a struggle in your mind: old affection is weaker than young pride and hope. Moreover, the world is to be faced; the new scenes around you are to be studied. An answer is penned full of kind remembrances, and begging a few days of delay. You wander, wondering, under the quaint old houses, and wishing for the return of Dalton.
He meets you with that happy, careless way of his,—the dangerous way which some men are born to, and which chimes easily to every tone of the world,—a way you wondered at once; a way you admire now; and a way that you will distrust as you come to see more of men. Miss Dalton—(it seems sacrilege to call her Laura)—is the same elegant being that entranced you first.
They urge you to join their party. But there is no need of urging: those eyes, that figure, the whole presence indeed of Miss Dalton, attract you with a power which you can neither explain nor resist. One look of grace enslaves you; and there is a strange pride in the enslavement.
----Is it dream, or is it earnest,—those moonlit walks upon the hills that skirt the city, when you watch the stars, listening to her voice, and feel the pressure of that jewelled hand upon your arm?—when you drain your memory of its whole stock of poetic beauties to lavish upon her ear? Is it love, or is it madness, when you catch her eye as it beams more of eloquence than lies in all your moonlight poetry, and feel an exultant gush of the heart that makes you proud as a man, and yet timid as a boy, beside her?
Has Dalton, with that calm, placid, nonchalant look of his, any inkling of the raptures which his elegant sister is exciting? Has the stout, elderly gentleman, who is so prodigal of his bouquets and attentions, any idea of the formidable rival that he has found? Has Laura herself—you dream—any conception of that intensity of admiration with which you worship?
----Poor Clarence! it is his first look at Life!
The Thousand Isles with their leafy beauties lie around your passing boat, like the joys that skirt us, and pass us, on our way through life. The Thousand Isles rise sudden before you, and fringe your yeasty track, and drop away into floating spectres of beauty, of haze, of distance, like those dreams of joy that your passion lends the brain. The low banks of Ontario look sullen by night; and the moon, rising tranquilly over the tops of vast forests that stand in majestic ranks over ten thousand acres of shore-land, drips its silvery sparkles along the rocking waters, and flashes across your foamy wake.
With such attendance, that subdues for the time the dreamy forays of your passion, you draw toward the sound of Niagara; and its distant, vague roar, coming through great aisles of gloomy forest, bears up your spirit, like a child's, into the Highest Presence.
The morning after, you are standing with your party upon the steps of the hotel. A letter is handed to you. Dalton remarks in a quizzical way, that "it shows a lady's hand."
"Aha, a lady!" says Miss Dalton,—and so gayly!
"A sister," I say; for it is Nelly's hand.
"By the by, Clarence," says Dalton, "it was a very pretty sister you gave us a glimpse of at Commencement."
"Ah, you think so;" and there is something in your tone that shows a little indignation at this careless mention of your fond Nelly; and from those lips! It will occur to you again.
A single glance at the letter blanches your cheek. Your heart throbs—throbs harder—throbs tumultuously. You bite your lip, for there are lookers-on. But it will not do. You hurry away; you find your chamber; you close and lock the door, and burst into a flood of tears.