While I was at College, I chanced, one summer, to fall into habits of frequent and intimate intercourse with a young man, whose intellectual countenance and refinement of character never failed to exercise a winning influence, even upon the most cursory of his acquaintance.
I may call our connection intimate; for I was the only one of our student set, whom he ever asked to go and see him, or himself occasionally visited. But in our relations, there was nothing of that wild, exuberant, often obtrusive kind of fraternizing, affected by our studious youth. From that, we were as far, when we parted in the autumn, as we had been on our first walk by the Rhine; when the same road, and the same delight in the marvellous beauty of the spring scenery before us had first introduced us to each other's notice.
Even of his worldly circumstances, I had learned but little. I had heard that he came of an ancient and noble house;--that his boyhood had been passed at his father. Count ----'s castle, under the direction of a French tutor, with whom he had then been sent to travel; and finally, at his own express desire, to college. There, he had ascertained, what he had long suspected; viz.: that in each and every branch of regular instruction he was totally deficient--Upon which, straightway he shut himself up with books and private tutors;--suffered the tumult of loose Burschen-life to sweep by him, without once lifting his eyes from his task;--and by the time I knew him, he had got so far as to rise every morning with the Ethica of Aristotle, and to lie down, at night, with a chorus of Euripides.
Not a shade of pedantry;--not a taint of scholastic rust,--was left to clog the free play of his mind, at the close of all those years of sharp-set study.--Numbers of industrious people work, because they do not know how to live. But his life was in his work;--he took science in its plenitude, with all his faculties at once. He acknowledged no intellectual gain, that did not tend to elevate his character, or stood at variance with his mental instincts.
In this sense, his was, perhaps, the most ideal nature I ever knew; if the term be not abused, as it too often is, to mean a vapid kind of beauty worship, and a sentimental distaste for rough realities; but used in its loftier, and certainly far rarer sense: an ideal standard of human character, resolutely upheld, and steadily pursued; with undaunted spirit, if with moderate expectations; and at whatever sacrifice of present brilliance and success, a thorough contempt of cram, as well as of every other form of professional narrow mindedness.
It is quite conceivable therefore, that the coarser kind of student pleasures could not prove ensnaring to this young hermit, whose seclusion came to be interpreted as aristocratic prejudice, from which no man could be more free. Education may have done something to confirm his natural aversion to all that was coarse, excessive, or impure. But as his scrupulous personal cleanliness was innate, so also was his almost maidenly delicacy in matters of morality. Never have I met such firmness of resolve, never so much masculine energy of intellect, united to so girlish a reluctance to talk of love and love affairs. Consequently, he kept aloof from all those clamorous carouses, where, amidst the fumes of liquor and tobacco, liberty and patriotism, love and friendship, God and immortality, are in their turns, discussed on the same broad basis of easy joviality as the last ball, or the newest cut of College cap. Even in a tête à tête, where he could so eloquently hold forth on any scientific problem, he very rarely touched on questions dealing with the most private and personal interests of man. History, diplomacy, politics, or the classics, were subjects he would discuss with passionate eagerness. Then he could wax as warm and fluent in debate, as though he were addressing a listening nation he would have won to some great purpose. To things of common life, he rarely referred. Of his own family, I never heard him speak. His father, he mentioned only once.
One evening, when I went to ask him whether he would join me in a row upon the river;--in one of those excursions of which he was so fond, when we used to take a little boat to a tavern a mile or two below the town, and, after a frugal meal, to walk home by starlight;--I found him just as he had thrown aside his pen, and was struggling with the resolution necessary to dress for an evening party.
"Pity me!" he cried, as I came in; "only look at that magnificent sunset, and imagine that I am doomed to turn my back upon it, and to go where I shall see no other midnight splendour but that of the stars on dress-coats!"
And he mentioned one of the most distinguished houses in the town, where a party was to be given in honor of some passing diplomate.