Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart

by Donald Grant Mitchell

Another time, as I was wandering among those mysterious figures that crowd the foyer of the French opera upon a night of the Masked Ball, I saw a familiar face; I followed it with my eye until I became convinced. He did not know me until I named his old seat upon the bench of the division rooms, and the hard-faced Tutor G——. Then we talked of the old rivalries, and Christmas jollities, and of this and that one, whom we had come upon in our wayward tracks; while the black-robed grisettes stared through their velvet masks; nor did we tire of comparing the old memories with the unearthly gayety of the scene about us until daylight broke.

In a quiet mountain town of New England I came not long since upon another; he was hale and hearty, and pushing his lawyer work with just the same nervous energy with which he used to recite a theorem of Euclid. He was father, too, of a couple of stout, curly-pated boys; and his good woman, as he called her, appeared a sensible, honest, good-natured lady. I must say that I envied him his wife much more than I had envied my companion of the opera his Domine.

I happened only a little while ago to drop into the college chapel of a Sunday. There were the same hard oak benches below, and the lucky fellows who enjoyed a corner seat were leaning back upon the rail, after the old fashion. The tutors were perched up in their side boxes, looking as prim and serious and important as ever. The same stout doctor read the hymn in the same rhythmical way; and he prayed the same prayer for (I thought) the same old sort of sinners. As I shut my eyes to listen, it seemed as if the intermediate years had all gone out, and that I was on my own pew bench, and thinking out those little schemes for excuses, or for effort, which were to relieve me, or to advance me, in my college world.

There was a pleasure, like the pleasure of dreaming about forgotten joys, in listening to the doctor’s sermon; he began in the same half embarrassed, half awkward way, and fumbled at his Bible leaves, and the poor pinched cushion, as he did long before. But as he went on with his rusty and polemic vigor, the poetry within him would now and then warm his soul into a burst of fervid eloquence, and his face would glow and his hand tremble, and the cushion and the Bible leaves be all forgot, in the glow of his thought, until, with a half cough and a pinch at the cushion, he fell back into his strong but tread-mill argumentation.

In the corner above was the stately, white-haired professor, wearing the old dignity of carriage, and a smile as bland as if the years had all been playthings; and had I seen him in his lecture-room, I daresay I should have found the same suavity of address, the same marvelous currency of talk, and the same infinite composure over the exploding retorts.

Near him was the silver-haired old gentleman—with a very astute expression—who used to have an odd habit of tightening his cloak about his nether limbs. I could not see that his eye was any the less bright; nor did he seem less eager to catch at the handle of some witticism or bit of satire—to the poor student’s cost. I remembered my old awe of him, I must say, with something of a grudge; but I had got fairly over it now. There are sharper griefs in life than a professor’s talk.

Farther on, I saw the long-faced, dark-haired man who looked as if he were always near some explosive, electric battery, or upon an insulated stool. He was, I believe, a man of fine feelings; but he had a way of reducing all action to dry, hard, mathematical system, with very little poetry about it. I know there was not much poetry in his problems in physics, and still less in his half-yearly examinations. But I do not dread them now.

Over opposite, I was glad to see still the aged head of the kind and generous old man who in my day presided over the college, and who carried with him the affections of each succeeding class—added to their respect for his learning. This seems a higher triumph to me now than it seemed then. A strong mind, or a cultivated mind, may challenge respect; but there is needed a noble one to win affection.

A new man now filled his place in the president’s seat, but he was one whom I had known and been proud to know. His figure was bent and thin—the very figure that an old Flemish master would have chosen for a scholar. His eye had a kind of piercing luster, as if it had long been fixed on books; and his expression—when unrelieved by his affable smile—was that of hard midnight toil. With all his polish of mind, he was a gentleman at heart, and treated us always with a manly courtesy that is not forgotten.

But of all the faces that used to be ranged below—four hundred men and boys—there was not one with whom to join hands and live back again. Their griefs, joy and toil were chaining them to their labor of life. Each one in his thought coursing over a world as wide as my own—how many thousand worlds of thought upon this one world of ours!