——Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
——I don't believe one word of what you are saying,—spoke up the angular female in black bombazine.
I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,—I said, and added softly to my next neighbor,—but you prove it.
The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in an undertone,—Optime dictum.
Your talking Latin,—said I,—reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them.—You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to hibernation. Intramural festivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:—
AESTIVATION.
An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor.
In candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rances;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exigous pool's conferva-scum,—
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!