——-school-friendships are not always found,
Though fair in promise, permanent and sound;
The most disinterested and virtuous minds,
In early years connected, time unbinds;
New situations give a different cast
Of habit, inclination, temper, taste;
And he that seem'd our counterpart at first,
Soon shews the strong similitude reversed.
Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm,
And make mistakes for manhood to reform.
Boys are, at best, but pretty buds unblown,
Whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known;
Each dreams that each is just what he appears,
But learns his error in maturer years,
When disposition, like a sail unfurled,
Shews all its rents and patches to the world.
Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters; the moral constitution—(except by a miracle of God's mercy,) never.
ἀνθρώποις δ᾽ ἀεὶ
Ὁ μὲν πονηρὸς, οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν κακὸς.1
“Believe if you will,” say the Persians, “that a mountain has removed from one place to another, but if you are told that a man has changed his nature, believe it not!”
1 EURIPIDES.
The best of us have but too much cause for making it part of our daily prayer that we fall into no sin! But there is an original pravity which deserves to be so called in the darkest import of the term,—an inborn and incurable disease of the moral being, manifested as soon as it has strength to show itself; and wherever this is perceived in earliest youth, it may too surely be predicted what is to be expected when all controul of discipline is removed. Of those that bring with them such a disposition into the world, it cannot be said that they fall into sin, because it is too manifest that they seek and pursue it as the bent of their nature. No wonder that wild theories have been devised to account for what is so mysterious, so aweful, and yet so incontestable! Zephaniah Holwell, who will always be remembered for his sufferings in the Black Hole, wrote a strange book in which he endeavoured to prove that men were fallen angels, that is, that human bodies are the forms in which fallen angels are condemned to suffer for the sins which they have committed in their former state. Akin to this is the Jewish fancy, held by Josephus, as well as his less liberalized countrymen, that the souls of wicked men deceased, got into the bodies of the living and possessed them; and by this agency they accounted for all diseases. Holwell's theory is no doubt as old as any part of the Oriental systems of philosophy and figments; it is one of the many vain attempts to account for that fallen nature of which every man who is sincere enough to look into his own heart, finds there what may too truly be called an indwelling witness. Something like the Jewish notion was held by John Wesley and Adam Clarke; and there are certain cases in which it is difficult not to admit it, especially when the question of the demoniacs is considered. Nor is there any thing that shocks us in supposing this to be possible for the body, and the mind also, as depending upon the bodily organs.—But that the moral being, the soul itself, the life of life, the immortal part, should appear, as so often it undoubtedly does, to be thus possessed, this indeed is of all mysterious things the darkest.
For a disposition thus evil in its nature it almost seems as if there could be no hope. On the other hand there is no security in a good one, if the support of good principles, (that is to say, of religion—of christian faith—) be wanting. It may be soured by misfortunes, it may be corrupted by wealth, it may be blighted by neediness, it may lose “all its original brightness.”
School friendships arise out of sympathy of disposition at an age when the natural disposition is under little controul and less disguise; and there are reasons enough, of a less melancholy kind than Cowper contemplated, why so few of these blossoms set, and of those which afford a promise of fruit, why so small a proportion should bring it to maturity. “The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie;”2 and even when not thus dissolved, the mutual attachment which in boyhood is continually strengthened by similarity of circumstance and pursuits, dies a natural death in most cases when that similarity ceases. If one goes north in the intellectual bearings of his course in life, and the other south, they will at last be far as the poles asunder. If their pursuits are altogether different, and their opinions repugnant, in the first case they cease to think of each other with any warm interest; in the second, if they think of each other at all, it is with an uncomfortable feeling, and a painful sense of change.
2 SHAKESPEAR.
The way in which too many ordinary minds are worsened by the mere course of time is finely delineated by Landor, in some verses which he designed as an imitation, not of a particular passage in a favourite Greek author, but of his manner and style of thought.