He went into his room, and I to mine.
A few years ago, there appeared a short poem called “Amor Mundi.”[1] While reading it, I involuntarily recalled this past experience at Oxford, for it described a young fellow’s setting-out on the downward path, as Tod did. Two of life’s wayfarers start on their long life journey: the woman first; the man sees and joins her; then speaks to her.
“Oh, where are you going, with your love-locks flowing,
And the west wind blowing along the narrow track?”
“This downward path is easy, come with me, an it please ye;
We shall escape the up-hill by never turning back.”
So they two went together in the sunny August weather;
The honey-blooming heather lay to the left and right:
And dear she was to dote on, her small feet seemed to float on
The air, like soft twin-pigeons too sportive to alight.
And so they go forth, these two, on their journey, revelling in the summer sunshine and giving no heed to their sliding progress; until he sees something in the path that startles him. But the syren accounts for it in some plausible way; it lulls his fear, and onward they go again. In time he sees something worse, halts, and asks her again:
“Oh, what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?”
“Oh, that’s a thin dead body that waits the Eternal term.”
The answer effectually arouses him, and he pulls up in terror, asking her to turn. She answers again, and he knows his fate.
“Turn again, oh my sweetest! Turn again, false and fleetest!
This way, whereof thou weetest, is surely Hell’s own track!”
“Nay, too late for cost counting, nay too steep for hill-mounting,
This downward path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
Shakespeare tells us that there is a tide in the affairs of man, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune: omitted, all the voyage of the after life is spent in shoals and miseries. That will apply to other things besides fortune. I fully believe that after a young fellow has set out on the downward path, in almost all cases there’s a chance given him of pulling up again, if he only is sufficiently wise and firm to seize upon it. The opportunity was to come for Tod. He had started; there was no doubt of that; but he had not got down very far yet and could go backward almost as easily as forward. Left alone, he would probably make a sliding run of it, and descend into the shoals. But the chance for him was at hand.
Our commons and Whitney’s went up to Gaiton’s room in the morning, and we breakfasted there. Lecture that day was at eleven, but I had work to do beforehand. So had Tod, for the matter of that; plenty of it. I went down to mine, but Tod stayed up with the two others.