SOME MEMORIES OF YALE.
'Through many an hour of summer suns,
By many pleasant ways,
Like Hezekiah's, backward runs
The shadow of my days.
I kiss the lips I once have kissed;
The gas-light wavers dimmer;
And softly through a vinous mist,
My college friendships glimmer.'
—Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue.
It is now I dare not say how many years since the night that chum and I, emerging from No. 24, South College, descended the well-worn staircase, and took our last stroll beneath the heavy shadows that darkly hung from the old elms of our Alma Mater. Commencement, with its dazzling excitement, its galleries of fair faces to smile and approve, its gathered wisdom to listen and adjudge, was no longer the goal of our student-hopes; and the terrible realization that our joyous college-days were over, now pressed hard upon us as we paced slowly along, listening to the low night wind among the summer leaves overhead, or looking up at the darkened windows whence the laugh and song of class-mates had so oft resounded to vex with mirth the drowsy ear of night—and tutors. I thought then, as I have often thought since, that our student-life must be 'the golden prime' compared with which all coming time would be as silver, brass, or iron. Here youth with its keenness of enjoyment and generous heartiness; freedom from care, smooth-browed and mirthful; liberal studies refining and elevating withal; the Numbers, whose ready sympathy had divided sorrow and multiplied joy, were associated as they never could be again; and so I doubt not many a one has felt as he stood at the door of academic life and looked away over its sunny meadows to the dark woodlands and rugged hillsides of world-life. How throbbed in old days the wandering student's heart as on the distant hill-top he turned to take a last look at disappearing Bologna and remembered the fair curtain-lecturing Novella de Andrea[1]—fair prototype of modern Mrs. Caudle; how his spirits rose when, like Lucentio, he came to 'fair Padua, nursery of arts;' or how he mused for the last time wandering beside the turbid Arno, in
'Pisa, renowned for grave citizens,'
we wot not. Little do we know either of the ancient 'larks' of the Sorbonne, of Leyden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam; somewhat less, in spite of gifted imagining, of The Student of Salamanca. But Howitt's Student Life in Germany, setting forth in all its noisy, smoking, beer-drinking conviviality the significance of the Burschenleben,
'I am an unmarried scholar and a free man;'
Bristed's Five Years in an English University, congenial in its setting forth of the Cantab's carnal delights and intellectual jockeyism; The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman, wherein one 'Cuthbert Bede, B.A.' has by 'numerous illustrations' of numerous dissipations, given as good an idea as is desirable of the 'rowing men' in that very antediluvian receptacle of elegant scholarship; are all present evidences of the affectionate interest with which the graduate reverts to his college days. In like manner Student Life in Scotland has engaged the late attention of venerable Blackwood, while the pages of Putnam, in Life in a Canadian College,[2] and Fireside Travels,[3] have given some idea of things nearer home, some little time ago. But while numerous pamphlets and essays have been written on our collegiate systems of education, the general development and present doings of Young America in the universities remain untouched.
The academic influences exerted over American students are, it must be premised, vastly different from those of the old world. Imprimis, our colleges are just well into being. Reaching back into no dim antiquity, their rise and progress are traceable from their beginnings—beginnings not always the greatest. Thus saith the poet doctor of his Alma Mater:
'Pray, who was on the Catalogue
When college was begun?
Two nephews of the President,
And the Professor's son,
(They turned a little Indian by,
As brown as any bun;)
Lord! how the Seniors knocked about
That Freshman class of one!'