The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

'Christie, you know I love you now, as I always have, better 'n all the world. But I'm a cripple now—no account to nobody—just a dead weight—an' I don't want you, 'cause o' your promise before I went away, to tie yourself to a load that'll be a drag on you all your life. That contract—ah—promises—an't—is—is hereby repealed! There!' And he leaned his head upon his hands and wept bitter tears, wrung by a great agony from his loving heart.

Christie gently laid her hand upon his shoulder, and spoke, slowly and calmly: 'Hopeful, your soul was not in that leg, was it?'

It would seem as if Hopeful had always thought that such was the case, and was just receiving new light upon the subject, he started up so suddenly.

'By jing! Christie!' And he grasped her hand, and—but that is another of those scenes that don't concern us at all. And Christie has promised next Christmas to take the name, as she already has the heart, of Tackett. Herr Kordwäner, too, has come to the conclusion that he wants a partner, and on the day of the wedding a new sign is to be put up over a new and larger shop, on which 'Co.' will mean Hopeful Tackett. In the mean time, Hopeful hammers away lustily, merrily whistling, and singing the praises of the 'Banger.' Occasionally, when he is resting, he will tenderly embrace his stump of a leg, gently patting and stroking it, and talking to it as to a pet. If a stranger is in the shop, he will hold it out admiringly, and ask:

'Do you know what I call that? I call that 'Hopeful Tackett—his mark.''

And it is a mark—a mark of distinction—a badge of honor, worn by many a brave fellow who has gone forth, borne and upheld by a love for the dear old flag, to fight, to suffer, to die if need be, for it; won in the fierce contest, amid the clashing strokes of the steel and the wild whistling of bullets; won by unflinching nerve and unyielding muscle; worn as a badge of the proudest distinction an American can reach. If these lines come to one of those that have thus fought and suffered—though his scars were received in some unnoticed, unpublished skirmish, though official bulletins spoke not of him, 'though fame shall never know his story'—let them come as a tribute to him; as a token that he is not forgotten; that those that have been with him through the trials and the triumphs of the field, remember him and the heroic courage that won for him by those honorable scars; and that while life is left to them they will work and fight in the same cause, cheerfully making the same sacrifices, seeking no higher reward than to take him by the hand and call him 'comrade,' and to share with him the proud consciousness of duty done. Shoulder-straps and stars may bring renown; but he is no less a real hero who, with rifle and bayonet, throws himself into the breach, and, uninspired by hope of official notice, battles manfully for the right.

Hopeful Tackett, humble yet illustrious, a hero for all time, we salute you.

JOHN BULL TO JONATHAN

You grow too fast, my child! Your stalwart limbs,
Herculean in might, now rival mine;
The starry light upon your forehead dims
The lustre of my crown—distasteful sign.
Contract thy wishes, boy! Do not insist
Too much on what's thine own—thou art too new!
Bend and curtail thy stature! As I list,
It is my glorious privilege to do.
Take my advice—I freely give it thee—
Nay, would enforce it. I am ripe in years—
Let thy young vigor minister to me!
Restrain thy freedom when it interferes!
No rival must among the nations be
To jeopardize my own supremacy!

JONATHAN TO JOHN BULL

Thanks for your kind advice, my worthy sire!
Though thrust upon me, and but little prized.
The offices you modestly require,
I reckon, will be scarcely realized.
My service to you! but not quite so far
That I will lop a limb, or force my lips
To gratify your longing. Not a star
Of my escutcheon shall your fogs eclipse!
Let noble deeds evince my parentage.
No rival I; my aim is not so low:
In nature's course, youth soon outstrippeth age,
And is survivor at its overthrow.
Freedom is Heaven's best gift. Thanks! I am free,
Nor will acknowledge your supremacy!

AMERICAN STUDENT LIFE

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 - 'In the fourteenth century, Novella de Andrea, daughter of the celebrated canonist, frequently occupied her father's chair; and her beauty was so striking, that a curtain was drawn before her in order not to distract the attention of the students.']—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 - Vol. i. p. 392.] and Fireside Travels,[3 - Vol. iii. pp. 379 and 473.] 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!'

From small beginnings and short lives our colleges have gathered neither that momentum of years heavy with mighty names and weighty memories, nor of wealth heaping massive piles and drawing within their cloistered walls the learning of successive centuries which carries the European universities crashing down the ages, though often heavy laden with the dead forms of mediæval preciseness. No established church makes with them common cause, no favoring and influential aristocracy gives them the careless security of a complete protection. Their development thus far has been under very different influences. Founded in the wilderness by our English ancestors, they were, at first, it is true, in their course of study and in foolish formula of ceremony an imperfect copy of trans-Atlantic originals. Starting from this point, their course has been shaped according to the peculiar genius of our institutions and people. Republican feeling has dispensed with the monastic dress, the servile demeanor toward superiors, and the ceremonious forms which had lost their significance. The peculiar wants of a new country have required not high scholarship, but more practical learning to meet pressing physical wants. Again, our numerous religious sects requiring each a nursery of its own children, and the great extent of our country, have called, or seemed to call (in spite of continually increasing facility of intercourse) for some one hundred and twenty colleges within our borders. Add to this a demand not peculiar but general—the increased claim of the sciences and of modern languages upon our regard—and the accompanying fallacy of supposing Latin and Greek heathenish and useless, and we have a summary view of the influences bearing upon our literary institutions. Hence both good and evil have arisen. Our colleges easily conforming in their youthful and supple energy, have met the demands of the age. They have thrown aside their monastic gowns and quadrangular caps. They have in good degree given up the pedantic follies of Latin versification and Hebrew orations. Their walls have arisen alike in populous city and lonely hamlet, and in poverty and insignificance they have been content could they give depth and breadth to any small portion of the national mind. They have conceded to Science the place which her rapid and brilliant progress demanded. On the other hand, however, we see long and well-proven systems of education profaned by the ignorant hands of superficial reformers. We see the colleges themselves dragging on a precarious life, yet less revered than cherished by fostering sects, and more hooted at by the advocates of potato-digging and other practical pursuits, than defended by their legitimate protectors. It is not to be denied that there is a powerful element of Materialism among us, and that too often we neither appreciate nor respect the earnest, abstruse scholar. The progress of humanity must be shouted in popular catch-words from the house-tops, and the noisy herald appropriates the laudation of him who in pain and weariness traced the hidden truth. We hear men of enlarged thought and lofty views derided as old fogies because beyond unassisted appreciation, until we are half-tempted to believe the generation to be multiplied Ephraims given to their idols, who had best be let alone.

The American student, under these influences, differs somewhat from his European brethren. He is younger by two or three years. Though generally from the better class, he is more, perhaps, identified with the mass of the people, and is more of a politician than a scholar. His remarks upon the Homeric dialects, however laudatory, are most suspiciously vague, and though he escape such slight errors as describing the Gracchi as a barbarous tribe in the north of Italy or the Piræus as a meat-market of Athens, you must beware of his classical allusions. On the other hand he is more moral, a more independent thinker and a freer man than his prototype across the sea. His fault is, as Bristed says, that he is superficial; his virtue, that he is straightforward and earnest in aiming at practical life.

Such may suffice for a few general remarks. But some memories of one of our most important universities will better set forth the habits and customs of the joyous student-life than farther wearisome generality.

The pleasant days are gone that I dreamed away beneath the green arcades of the fair Elm City. But still come the budding spring and the blooming summer to embower those quiet streets and to fill the morning hour with birds' sweet singing. Still comes the gorgeous autumn—the dead summer lain in state—and the cloud-robed winter to round the circling year. Still streams the golden sunlight through the green canopies of tented elms, and still, I ween, do pretty school-girls (feminine of student) loiter away in flirting fascination the holiday afternoons beneath their shade. Still do our memories haunt those old walks we loved so well: the avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, where the midnight moon shone so softly through the dark masses of foliage and slept so sweetly on the sloping green. Still do those old wharves and warehouses—ancient haunts of colonial commerce and scenes of continental struggle—rest there in dusty quiet, hearing but murmurs of the noisy merchant-world without; and the fair bay lies silent among those green hills that slope southward to the Sound. Methinks I hear the ripple of its moonlit waves as in the summer night it upbore our gallant boat and its fair freight; the far-off music stealing o'er the bright waters; the distant rattling of some paid-out cable as a newly arrived bark anchors down the bay; or the lonely baying of a watch-dog at some farm-house on the hight. I see the sail-boats bending under their canvas and dashing the salt spray from their bows as they rush through the smooth water, and the oyster-boats cleaving the clear brine like an arrow, bound for Fair Haven, of many shell-fish; while sturdy sloops and schooners—suggestive of lobsters or pineapples—bow their big heads meekly and sway themselves at rest. I see again those long lines of green-wooded slope, here crowned by a lonely farm-house musing solitary on the hills as it looks off on the blue Sound, there ending abruptly in a weather-worn cliff of splintered trap, or anon bringing down some arable acres to the very beach, where a gray old cottage, kept in countenance by two or three rugged poplars, like the fisher's hut,

'In der blauen Fluth sich beschaut.'

Nor can I soon forget those wild hillsides, so glorious both when the summer floods of foliage came pouring down their sides, and when autumn, favorite child of the year, donned his coat of many colors and came forth to join his brethren. Then, on holiday-afternoon, free from student-care, we climbed the East or West Rock, and looked abroad over the distant city-spires, rock-ribbed hillside and sail-dotted sea; or threading the devious path to the Judges' Cave, where tradition said that in colonial times the regicides, Goffe and Whalley, lay hidden, read on the lone rock that in the winter wilderness overhung their bleak hiding-place, in an old inscription carved not without pain, in quaint letters of other years, the stern and stirring old watchword:

'RESISTANCE TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD.'

Or, going further, we climbed Mount Carmel, and looked from its steep cliff down into the solitary rock-strewn valley—

'Where storm and lightning from that huge gray wall,