Taken up more and more with social distractions, he ceased to apply himself to his college duties. Indeed, he had never felt much interest in the studies of the curriculum, excepting Latin, for which he had a taste and in which his scholarship was fairly good. Mathematics was his pet aversion. He did considerable miscellaneous reading, and cultivated a liking for the old British dramatists and Commonwealth prose writers, like Burton, Taylor, and Browne; his studies in whom he afterwards imparted to the readers of the “American Monthly.” He wrote to his father, shortly before graduation, that he had devoted his whole time in college to literature.
Always more of a ladies’ man than a man’s man, fastidious too in the choice of acquaintances, he took small part in college affairs, and preferred the social life of the town. He was not a frequenter of Linonia, that forum whose decay furnishes an annual theme for lamentation to returning graduates at Commencement. But once he debated that perennial question, “Were the Crusades a Benefit to Europe?” and once he composed a comedy, which was acted in the society with applause, though not without scandal. The following reminiscences will find an echo in the breast of many an alumnus who in his salad days has sparkled out in some “Coffee Club” or “Studio,” or other Ambrosial experiment of the kind:—
“I sunk some pocket money in a blank book on reading Wilson’s ‘Noctes.’ Celestial nights I thought we had of it, at old black Stanley’s forbidden oyster house in New Haven; and it struck me it was robbery of posterity (no less!) not to record the brilliant efflorescence of our conviviality. Regularly on reaching my chambers (or as soon after morning prayers as my head became pellucid), I attempted to reduce to dialogue the wit of our Christopher North, ‘Shepherd’ and ‘Tickler;’ but alas! it became what may be called ‘productive labor.’ Either my memory did not serve me, or wit (I shouldn’t be surprised) reads cold by repentant daylight. It was heavy work, as reluctant as a college exercise, and after using up for cigar-lighters the short-lived ‘Noctes,’ I devoted the remainder of the book to outlines of the antique (that is to say, of old shoes), my passion just then being a collection of French slippers from the prettiest feet in the known world (‘known,’ to me).”
Among the uncollected “Recorder” verses is a series of three divertingly Byronic performances, “Misanthropic Hours,” from which it would seem that the poet, in his junior year, had a momentary attack of cynicism, produced by his discovery of the soullessness of “woman.” Most boys who tag lines have gone through this species of measles.
“I do not hate, but I have felt
Indifferent to woman long:
I bow not where I once have knelt,
I lisp not what I poured in song.