Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXVII, August 1852, Vol. V

Then, when the long list was called, and the degrees had been conferred, came my turn – "the valedictory addresses." In that moment, as I gathered my gown around me and ascended the platform, I did not envy Demosthenes nor Cicero, nor believe that a sweeter triumph was ever won. That soft, country summer-day, and I the focus of a thousand enthusiastic eyes to which the low words of farewell I spoke to my companions, brought a sympathetic moisture – that is a picture which must burn forever, illuminating life. The first palpable and visible evidence of your power over others is that penetrating aroma of success – sweeter than success itself – which comes only once, and only for a moment, but for that single moment is a dream made real. The memory of that day makes June in my mind forever.

You see I am growing garrulous, and do not come to Saratoga by steam. But I did come, fresh from that triumph, and full of it. I had been the greatest man of the greatest day in a town not five hundred miles away, and could not but feel that my fame must have excited Saratoga. With what modest trembling I wrote my name in the office-book. The man scarcely looked at it, but wrote a number against it, shouted to the porter to take Mr. – 's (excuse my name) luggage to No. 310, and I mechanically followed that functionary, and observed that not a single loiterer in the office raised his head at my name.

But worse than that, the name seemed to be of no consequence. I was no longer Mr. – with "the valedictory addresses," &c., &c. (including the thousand eyes). I was merely No. 310 – and you too have already observed, I am sure, wherever you are passing the summer, that you are not an individual at a Watering-Place. You lose your personal identity in a great summer hotel, as you would in a penitentiary; you are No. this or No. that. It is No. 310 who wishes his Champagne frappé. It is No. 310 who wishes his card taken to No. 320. It is No. 310 who goes in the morning, pays his bill, and hears, as the porter slings on his luggage and takes his shilling, "put No. 310 in order."

This is one of the humiliating aspects of Watering-Place life. You are one of a mass, and distinguished by your number. Yet you can never know the mortifying ignominy of such treatment until it comes directly upon the glory of a commencement, at which you have absorbed all other individuality into yourself.

I reached Saratoga and came down to dinner. I could not help laughing at the important procession of negro-waiters stamping in with the different courses, and concentrating attention upon their movements. I felt then, instinctively, how it is the last degree of vulgarity – that the serving at table instead of being noiseless as the wind that blows the ship along, is the chief spectacle and amusement at dinner. Dinner at Saratoga, or Newport, or Niagara is a grand military movement of black waiters, who advance, halt, load, present, and fire their dishes, and in which the elegant ladies and the elegant gentlemen are merely lay-figures, upon which the African army exercise their skill by not hitting or spilling. For the first days of my residence it was a quiet enjoyment to me to see with what elaborate care the fine ladies and gentlemen arrayed themselves to play their inferior parts at dinner. The chief actors in the ceremony – the negro waiters – ran, a moment before the last bell, to put on clean white jackets and when the bell rang, and the puppets were seated – fancying, with charming naïveté, that they were the principle objects of the feast – then thundered in the sable host and deployed right and left, tramping like the ghost in Don Giovanni, thumping, clashing, rattling, and all thought of elegance or propriety was lost in the universal tumult.

People who submit to this, consider themselves elegant. But what if in their own houses and dining-rooms there should be this "alarum, enter an army," as the old play-books say, whenever they entertained their friends at dinner.

I was lonely at first. Nothing is so solitary as a gay and crowded Watering-Place, where you have few friends. The excessive hilarity of others emphasizes your own quiet and solitude. And especially at Saratoga, where there is no resource but the company. You must bowl, or promenade the piazza, or flirt, with the women. You must drink, smoke, chat, and game a little with the men. But if you know neither women nor men, and have no prospect of knowing them, then take the next train to Lake George.

It is very different elsewhere. At Newport, for instance, if you are only No. 310 at your hotel and nothing more; if you know no one, and have to drink your wine, and smoke, and listen to the music alone, you have only to leap into your saddle, gallop to the beach, and as you pace along the margin of the sea, that will laugh with you at the frivolities you have left behind – will sometimes howl harsh scorn upon the butterflies, who are not worth it, and who do not deserve it – and the Atlantic will be to you lover, counselor, and sweet society.

Toward the end of my first Saratoga week, I met an old college friend. It was my old chum, Herbert, from the South. Herbert, who, over many a midnight glass and wasting weed, had leaned out of my window in the moonlight, and recited those burning lines of Byron which all students do recite to that degree, that I have often wondered what students did, in romantic moonlights, before Byron was born. In those midnight recitals Herbert used often to stop, and say to me:

"I wonder if you would like my sister?"

Her name was not mentioned, but Herbert was so handsome in the southern style; he was so picturesque, and manly, and graceful – a kind of Sidney and Bayard – that I was sure his sister was not less than Amy Robsart, or Lucy of Lammermoor, or perhaps Zuleika.

Toward the close of our course, we were one day sauntering beyond the little college-town, and dreaming dreams of that Future which, to every ambitious young man, seems a stately palace waiting to be royally possessed by him, when Herbert, who really loved me, said:

"I wish you knew Lulu."

"I wish I did know Lulu."

And that was all we ever said about it.

When we met at Saratoga it was a pleasant surprise to both, and doubly so to me, for I was sadly bored by my want of acquaintances. We fell into an earnest conversation, in the midst of which Herbert suddenly said:

"Ah! there, I must run and join Lulu!" and left me.

Who has not had just this experience, or a similar one, at any Watering-Place? One day you suddenly discover that some certain person has arrived; and when you go to your room to dress for dinner, your boots look splayed – your waistcoats are not the thing – your coat isn't half as handsome as other coats – and you spoil all your cravats in your nervous efforts to tie them exquisitely. You get dressed, however, and descend to dinner, giving yourself a Vivian Grey-ish air – a combination of the coxcomb, the poet, and the politician – and yet wonder why your hands seem so large, and why you do not feel at your ease, although every thing is the same as yesterday, except that Lulu has arrived.

And there she sits!

So sat Lulu, Herbert's sister, cool in light muslin, as if that sultry summer day she were Undine draped in mist. She had the self-possession, which many children have, and which greatly differs from the elaborate sang froid of elegant manners. There was no haughty reserve, no cold unconsciousness, as if the world were not worth her treading. But when Herbert nodded to me – and I, knowing that she was about to look at me, involuntarily put forward the poet-aspect of Vivian – she turned and looked toward me earnestly and unaffectedly for a few moments, while I played with a sweet-bread, and looked abstracted. It is a pity that we men make such fools of ourselves when we are in the callow state! Lulu turned back and said something to Herbert; of course, it was telling him her first impression of me! Do you think I wished to hear it?

She was not tall nor superb: her face was very changeful and singularly interesting. I watched her during dinner, and such were my impressions. If they were wrong, it was the fault of my perceptions.

We met upon the piazza after dinner while the beautifully-dressed throng was promenading, and the band was playing. It was an Arcadian moment and scene.

"Lulu, this is my friend, Mr. – , of whom I have spoken to you so often."

Herbert remained but a moment. I offered my arm to his sister, and we moved with the throng. The whole world seemed a festival. The day was golden – the music swelled in those long, delicious chords, which imparadise the moment, and make life poetry. In that strain, and with that feeling, our acquaintance commenced. It was Lulu's first summer at a Watering-Place (at least she said so); it was my first, too, at a Watering-Place – but not my first at a flirtation, thought I, loftily. She had all the cordial freshness of a Southern girl, with that geniality of manner which, without being in the least degree familiar, is confiding and friendly, and which to us, reserved and suspicious Northerners, appears the evidence of the complete triumph we have achieved, until we see that it is a general and not a particular manner.

The band played on: the music seemed only to make more melodious and expressive all that we said. At intervals, we stopped and leaned upon the railing by a column wreathed with a flowering vine, and Lulu's eye seeking the fairest blossom, found it, and her hand placed it in mine. I forgot commencement-day, and the glory of the valedictory. Lulu's eyes were more inspiring than the enthusiastic thousand in the church; and the remembered bursts of the band that day were lost in the low whispers of the girl upon my arm. I do not remember what we said. I did not mean to flirt, in the usual sense of that word (men at a Watering-Place never do). It was an intoxication most fatal of all, and which no Maine law can avert.

Herbert joined us later in the afternoon, and proposed a drive; he was anxious to show me his horses. We parted to meet at the door. Lulu gently detached her arm from mine; said gayly, "Au revoir, bientôt!" as she turned away; and I bounded into the hall, sprang up-stairs into my room, and sat down, stone-still, upon a chair.

I looked fixedly upon the floor, and remained perfectly motionless for five minutes. I was lost in a luxury of happiness! Without a profession, without a fortune, I felt myself irresistibly drawn toward this girl; – and the very fascination lay here, that I knew, however wild and wonderful a feeling I might indulge, it was all hopeless. We should enjoy a week of supreme happiness – suffer in parting – and presently be solaced, and enjoy other weeks of supreme felicity with other Lulus!

My young friends of the Watering-Places, deny having had just such an emotion and "course of thought," if you dare!

We drove to the lake, and the whole world of Saratoga with us. Herbert's new bays sped neatly along – he driving in front, Lulu and I chatting behind. Arrived at the lake, we sauntered down the steep slope to the beach. We stepped into a boat and drifted out upon the water. It was still and gleaming in the late afternoon; and the pensive tranquillity of evening was gathering before we returned. We sang those passionate, desperate love-songs which young people always sing when they are happiest and most sentimental. So rapidly had we advanced – for a Watering-Place is the very hot-bed of romance – that I dropped my hand idly upon Lulu's; and finding that hers was not withdrawn, gradually and gently clasped it in mine. So, hand-in-hand, we sang, floating homeward in the golden twilight.

There was a dance in the evening at the hotel. Lulu was to dance with me, of course, the first set, and as many waltzes as I chose. She was so sparkling, so evidently happy, that I observed the New York belles, to whom happiness is an inexplicable word, scanned her with an air of lofty wonder and elegant disdain. But Lulu was so genuinely graceful and charming; she remained so quietly superior in her simplicity to the assuming hauteur of the metropolitan misses, that I kept myself in perfect good-humor, and did not feel myself at all humbled in the eyes of the Young America of that city, because I was the cavalier of the unique Southerner. So far did this go, that in my desire to revenge myself upon the New Yorkers, I resolved to increase their chagrin by praising Lulu to the chief belle of the set.

To her I was introduced. A New York belle at a Watering-Place! "There's a divinity doth hedge her," and a mystery too. She looked at me with supreme indifference as I advanced to the ordeal of presentation, evidently measuring my claims upon her consideration by the general aspect of my outer man. I moved with a certain pride, because although I felt awkward before the glance of Lulu, I was entirely self-possessed in the consciousness of unexceptionable attire before the unmeaning stare of the fashionable parvenue. You see I do get a little warm in speaking of her, and yet I was as cool as an autumn morning, when I made my bow, and requested her hand for the next set.

We danced vis-a-vis to Lulu. My partner swung her head around upon her neck, as none but Juno or Minerva should venture to do, and looked at the other personal of the quadrille, to see if she were in a perfectly safe set. I ventured a brief remark upon nothing – the weather, probably. The Queen of the Cannibal Islands bent majestically in a monosyllabic response.

"It is very warm to-night," continued I.

"Yes, very warm," she responded.

"You have been long here?"

"Two weeks."

"Probably you came from Niagara?"

"No, from Sharon."

"Shall you go to Lake George?"

"No, we go to Newport."

There I paused, and fondled my handkerchief, while the impassible lady relapsed into her magnificent silence, and offered no hope of any conversation in any direction. But I would not be balked of my object, and determined that if the living stream did run "quick below," the glaring polish of ice which these "fine manners" presented, my remark should be an Artesian bore to it.

"How handsome our vis-a-vis is?" said I.

My stately lady said nothing, but tossed her head slightly, without changing her expression, except to make it more pointedly frigid, in a reply which was a most vociferous negative, petrified by politeness into ungracious assent.

"She is what Lucia of Lammermoor might have been before she was unhappy," continued I, plunging directly off into the sea of trouble.

"Ah! I don't know Miss Lammermoor," responded my partner, with sang-froid.

I am conscious that I winced at this. A New York belle, hedged with divinity and awfulness, &c., not know Miss Lammermoor. Such stately naïveté of ignorance drew a smile into my eyes, and I concluded to follow the scent.

"You misunderstand me," said I. "I was speaking of Scott's Lucia – the Waverley novel, you know."

"Waverley, Waverley," replied my Cannibal Queen, who moved her head like Juno, but this time lisping and somewhat confused, as if she knew that, by the mention of books, we were possibly nearing the verge of sentiment. "Waverley – I don't know what you mean: you're too deep for me."

I was silent for that moment, and sat a mirthful Marius, among the ruins of my proud idea of a metropolitan belle. Had she not exquisitely perfected my revenge? Could the contrast of my next dance with Lulu have been pointed with more diamond distinctness than by the unweeting lady, whom I watched afterward, with my eyes swimming in laughter, as she glided, passionlessly, without smiling, without grace, without life – like a statue clad in muslin, over grass-cloth, around the hall. Once again, during the evening, I went to her and said:

"How graceful that Baltimore lady is."