THERE

REMINISCENCES.

HERE are certain periods in every man's life that re-create him-mark his eras-certify him to himself and, perhaps-inflate him. They are touches of Nature that often make akin the civilized world. Recollections are like a river-bed. At their earliest source are only large deposits that can resist the wearing of the stream of Time; while far down where the coursing Past merges into the broad ocean of the Present, his experiences are as numerous and close-packed as sand-grains, a very silt of detail. A strong memory may go back to some triumph of babyhood, but for a starting-point, recall the self-consciousness with which you paraded your first pair of knickerbockers. It seemed exceeded only by the pompous joy that came with their lengthening. When we were well along in school, a new epoch came with the realization-so we thought-that somebody-else's sister preferred us to any one else in the world, and that we reciprocated. At graduation again everyone bowed, congratulated, applauded. We were idols, autocrats. We said with Monte Cristo, "the world is mine,"-all except per

VOL. LVII.

I

DW

haps that mysterious college-land which we saw in imagination a blessed Mecca where perfections floated dimly among sequestered classic shades-and took our diplomas with a knowing air that came as insensibly and inevitably as our normal perspiration.

Again we added one to Charles Lamb's couple of annual birthdays 'the one which in a special manner we termed ours, and New Year's day '-when on that cloudy September day, examination barriers leaped, we became 'college men,' and woke next morning, with an odd feeling of pride and abashed expectancy, to the signal that started the college machinery, the prolonged clang of the Old Chapel bell. Whether we believed in the nebular hypothesis or not, we found its analogy in the birth of our class. A misty chaos of strange individuals, restless, shifting, unplaced, were the atoms. The rush was the fusion, the compacting, and though there were occasional signs of solidifying, the elements were still turbulent during the first ensuing weeks of semi-orderly confusion. We watched with wonder an anomaly known as the 'skyrocket' burst through the forming strata of his classmates and go sailing toward the upper heavens, only to fall back shortly, burnt out or quite extinguished, while we settled, and leveled, and balanced, and the cohesive force called friendship entered and spread among us. Thus it was we grew into a little world with its forces and counter-forces, its materials and their properties (as most metaphors on the subject will suggest), with an orbit of nine months, and an existence of four years.

But we did not enjoy college life. It was too new,—or we were. There was nothing not unfamiliar. The strange sound of the chapel clock, its ever tolling chimes, and Trinity on Sunday with its jangling peal of running octaves like a bevy of disordered alarm clocks, and then those abominated diagonal brick pavements with their mountains and valleys, and insidious frost-patches in winter. With what awe and attention we heard that first sermon in the chapel, and how were we surprised and horrified at the ripple of laughter that passed among the upper class

men, when the preacher earnestly but ignorantly uttered some suggestive word that had been incorporated in the untranslatable college slang. The landlady was grasping or queer, the routine irksome, half our mates strangers, and the fretting distress ever present that threefourths of the college always would be. (That doesn't trouble us so much now, but we saw then from the fresh man standpoint.) Petty vexations were forgotten as best possible on those surpassing autumnal days when even shadows seemed to glow there was such a glare in the sparkling atmosphere; and training too, and library hours lifted us somewhat out of ourselves. Once at night-fall, as the snaky elm-branches melted into the black of the darkening sky, the campus echoes woke to the glees of a jolly group of returned students, and as the sounds ceased, the blind faith strengthened that perhaps the refrain, 'tis a jolly life,' might be true after all.

That was a strange procession of hours we look back on, each day so protracted from its fullness of event, and the sum total of a term brief as a single day; our work increasing as time passed like Tantalus'-the more done, the more left undone-while time was for everything, and sleeping hours fell away to a 'nap before breakfast.'

In rainy-day talks on the window seat, our original word-coiners-they are genii of each college generationgerminated and sprouted much of our eloquent slang; there too, were brewed those nocturnal amenities, those jovial and mystic forerunners of sick excuses known as 'games,' to the initiated. Though 'blueness'-—if I may so title that sombre feeling that is neither homesickness nor melancholia-and 'shop' were tabooed topics, we had our sober and reflective moods, and thought and felt more than we cared to admit freely, about our education and its relations to ultimate ambitions.

A canvass of the class would undoubtedly have shown a majority in favor of more and earlier optionals, and even of placing the classics in the same category. This opinion seemed held on 'general principles-which are often no principles at all because wholly indefinite-and

apparently took its rise in a selfish motive. The subject matter was dry, the form trying, and therefore approached with wry face and unwilling step as in boyhood we took medicine without a sugar coating. How many of us sweetened or smothered the unpalatableness with a flavoring of cribs or a sauce of translations? It is a sad fact, though undeniable, that the classics are an acquired taste to the average young American as is what is best in every Art. The late James Freeman Clarke claimed to liking them from the start, but sanctioned and upheld the use of translations, and we believed that half the secret of his penchant lay therein. We knew that Emerson sided with Clarke and was supported by the body of scientists not extreme radicals like Darwin who utters a bitter and wholesale condemnation of the Latin and Greek of his early years.

The beauties were doubtless there, but though the tendency to short cuts in American methods of study is justly charged with being destructive to thoroughness and concentration, we felt like complaining that the road to said beauties was tediously roundabout. Alack, for the dreary drills in prosody and syntax as if they were the staples; while, as a matter of fact, we were left largely to forage for the beauties ourselves, and constrained to believe Pascal as the vastness of unexplored knowledges opened about us,-" The life of man is miserably short."

Discipline was considerable; but discipline aside, the most stress was laid on classic beauties; and wherefore, we wanted sometimes to ask, were not Job and Isaiah examined and taught, not from the reglious stand-point, but as masterpieces of literature which they are? Were we more fitted, we said, to comprehend the charms of Homer in our so lame and occult renderings, than the mild obliquities of Hebrew poems of equally transcendent grandeur done into English by careful masters of both tongues? Or did venerable opposition to translations instinctively debar such works from the curriculum? The vision is old and keen that discerns at a glance such diversities as the meaning of foreign words, the meaning of a profound

thought, and involved forms that both set forth and obscure at the same time; and our insight, too, shared our callowness. We hope the scales will continue to drop from our eyes with advancing maturity, but-while apologizing for our stupidity—since reading Keats, and the encomiums of a score of authors on two famous translations-authors whose writings have since become classic in our own tongue-we shall cherish a certain regret that Prof. Conington did not introduce us to Virgil, and that we did not see the beauties of Homer through Mr. Chapman's lens, instead of our own. We beg pardon if we have said anything that might be misconceived by dead authors in dead languages; there is no danger of their going out of printrest their shades!

Certainly classic studies brought about in a small way what Lowell claims as their end, namely, "a love for something apart from and above the more vulgar associations of life;" but for the same wholesome result multiplied an hundred-fold, our true debt rests in that broad and indefinable happiness, 'college life.' I said indefinable. Have you ever written a satisfactory letter on college life? Are there words for the flush of rivalry? Can you describe the warm satisfaction and inspiration in your college's victories? the pain and stimulus in her defeat? have you told what the simple presence of your closest friend means to you? can you analyze "the sweet assurance of a look?" These, in part, are our penetralia, the seeds of our affection and loyalty, the blessings of this rendezvous of happy spirits. They are not to be profaned by being talked about, these realities so intangible. Nature kindly claps a muffler on our powers of expression in their presence, man never made an adequate vocabulary, and whoso has not entered here can never know them.

Frank Julian Price.