DUNLEVY AT HARVARD.
Long afterwards, a year and more, I went to Harvard College for the purpose of pursuing special studies. I was standing one rainy November afternoon in the stone vestibule of Gore Hall. A figure approached with his head close under an umbrella, which he closed as he entered the library. It was Dunlevy. Our eyes twinkled a moment, then we each grasped the other’s hand. It was like coming from the cold into a warm room to meet a southerner in New England.
“I am afraid you don’t remember me;” I said.
“Don’t I!” he exclaimed; “do you suppose I could forget the man who came to see me twice when I took sick at the dear old ‘U. Va.’ and who is also an admirer of Cardinal Newman’s style?”
His memory astonished me; and it touched me to think that the man should be grateful for my simple attention of calling upon him when he was ill. After a few words of greeting I told him that I had an appointment and should have to hurry on, but that if he would tell me where he lived I would come to see him. He told me the number of his room in Beck Hall.
“I have a corner window in the rear;” he said, as we parted.
Well, I went to see him; and he returned my calls, for that was all they were—just calls. Somehow or other, Dunlevy and I were not to become intimate. It seemed as though I were handling a piece of quicksilver on an earthen platter, looking so bright, so impressionable, and yet the moment one would say, “You are mine!” all was gone, scattered and running in every direction, nowhere to be seized. So long as I did not seek to make an intimate friend of him, all went well.
To describe how I felt when calling on Dunlevy, I may do best by quoting this sentence from Emerson:
“He is solitary because he has society in his thought, and, when people come in, they drive away his society and isolate him.”