The new feeling, wild and vague as it is,—for as yet you have only most casual acquaintance with Laura Dalton,—invests the whole habit of your study; not quickening overmuch the relish for Dugald Stewart, or the miserable skeleton of college Logic, but spending a sweet charm upon the graces of Rhetoric and the music of Classic Verse. It blends harmoniously with your quickened ambition. There is some last appearance that you have to make upon the college stage, in the presence of the great worthies of the State, and of all the beauties of the town,—Laura chiefest among them. In view of it you feel dismally intellectual. Prodigious faculties are to be brought to the task.
You think of throwing out ideas that will quite startle His Excellency the Governor, and those very distinguished public characters whom the college purveyors vote into their periodic public sittings. You are quite sure of surprising them, and of deeply provoking such scheming, shallow politicians as have never read Wayland's "Treatise," and who venture incautiously within hearing of your remarks. You fancy yourself in advance the victim of a long leader in the next day's paper, and the thoughtful but quiet cause of a great change in the political programme of the State. But crowning and eclipsing all the triumph, are those dark eyes beaming on you from some corner of the church their floods of unconscious praise and tenderness.
Your father and Nelly are there to greet you. He has spoken a few calm, quiet words of encouragement, that make you feel—very wrongfully—that he is a cold man, with no earnestness of feeling. As for Nelly, she clasps your arm with a fondness, and with a pride, that tell at every step her praises and her love.
But even this, true and healthful as it is, fades before a single word of commendation from the new arbitress of your feeling. You have seen Miss Dalton! You have met her on that last evening of your cloistered life in all the elegance of ball-costume; your eye has feasted on her elegant figure, and upon her eye sparkling with the consciousness of beauty. You have talked with Miss Dalton about Byron, about Wordsworth, about Homer. You have quoted poetry to Miss Dalton; you have clasped Miss Dalton's hand!
Her conversation delights you by its piquancy and grace; she is quite ready to meet you (a grave matter of surprise!) upon whatever subject you may suggest. You lapse easily and lovingly into the current of her thought, and blush to find yourself vacantly admiring when she is looking for reply. The regard you feel for her resolves itself into an exquisite mental love, vastly superior, as you think, to any other kind of love. There is no dream of marriage as yet, but only of sitting beside her in the moonlight during a countless succession of hours, and talking of poetry and nature, of destiny and love.
Magnificent Miss Dalton!
----And all the while vaunting youth is almost mindless of the presence of that fond Nelly whose warm sisterly affection measures itself hopefully against the proud associations of your growing years,—and whose deep, loving eye, half suffused with its native tenderness, seems longing to win you back to the old joys of that Home-love, which linger on the distant horizon of your boyhood like the golden glories of a sinking day.
As the night wanes, you wander for a last look toward the dingy walls that have made for you so long a home. The old broken expectancies, the days of glee, the triumphs, the rivalries, the defeats, the friendships, are recalled with a fluttering of the heart that pride cannot wholly subdue. You step upon the chapel-porch in the quiet of the night as you would step on the graves of friends. You pace back and forth in the wan moonlight, dreaming of that dim life which opens wide and long from the morrow. The width and length oppress you: they crush down your struggling self-consciousness like Titans dealing with Pygmies. A single piercing thought of the vast and shadowy future, which is so near, tears off on the instant all the gewgaws of pride, strips away the vanity that doubles your bigness, and forces you down to the bare nakedness of what you truly are!
With one more yearning look at the gray hulks of building, you loiter away under the trees. The monster elms, which have bowered your proud steps through four years of proudest life, lift up to the night their rounded canopy of leaves with a quiet majesty that mocks you. They kiss the same calm sky which they wooed four years ago; and they droop their trailing limbs lovingly to the same earth, which has steadily and quietly wrought in them their stature and their strength. Only here and there you catch the loitering footfall of some other benighted dreamer, strolling around the vast quadrangle of level green, which lies, like a prairie-child, under the edging shadows of the town. The lights glimmer one by one; and one by one, like breaking hopes, they fade away from the houses. The full-risen moon, that dapples the ground beneath the trees, touches the tall church-spires with silver, and slants their loftiness—as memory slants grief—in long, dark, tapering lines upon the silvered Green.