TURN back far enough, reader, and you will find inscribed upon the Tontine register, with a careful hand, the above name and place. I had come to-college. I was a new creature. The bustle and the jar of this great caravansary, how unlike the little bar-room of our Brighton tavern! where have I sat many a time when a boy, and watched the great glittering sign of 'the Eagle,' swinging to and fro upon its gallows frame. But the recollection of our portly landlord, and his little wooden bench without the door, and the pipe stumps carefully cleaned and laid away above the lintel-I would not bring to mind. I had gone out from the home of my father's, and in my native kindness could not but pity the simple and unpretending ignorance I had left behind me. [Alas! now I can smile at the folly which I then thought my wisdom!] Back and forth I strode with an air of conscious pride, already anticipating the elation of spirit which I should soon realize when fairly immured within those scholastic walls. Stirred by the crowd of busy present and prospective pleasures, which thronged upon my mind, I could scarce contemplate with any degree of calmness, the novelty and the reality of my situation. Friends of my youth I had left, and had they now appeared before me, I doubt whether I could have relished their society, so enthralled was I by the strange emotions which lifted my mind into an ideal sphere. * We give in full, the note accompanying: "Messrs. Editors, I purpose giving in the proposed series of papers, of which two are laid before you, a history of my short-sighted experience, while in this University. If they may meet with your favor, please suffer me to continue an anonymous correspondence with you, since an acknowledged authorship might throw some suspicions upon me of direct allusions in my portraitures, which I would avoid, and in which allusions, I shall by no means indulge. Yrs, T. B." Days passed, and I was a partaker of the duties-delightful duties enjoined upon me. Acquaintances had not yet been formed, save some few furniture and clothes venders, and they-how gentlemanly-how obliging! I felt really charmed by their politeness and respect to one so much a stranger. By degrees, however, their disinterestedness abated, for the customs of Brighton were those of the strictest economy, and the state of my funds, I found, notwithstanding my change of spirit, required a most rigid conformance with them. Weeks passed on, and duties thickened on me; I thought of the trifling anxieties of home-of the watchful solicitude, and playful tenderness of friends, and the relapse came. Still I had too much pride to feel it, and I struggled on, though my heart sometimes quailed, and the tear started to my eye, when I felt the gross outrages of my elders in college life. A keen sensibility had early marked me for her victim; my sympathies were strong, and I remember well the time when they first came upon me in their full force-yet when I was too young to have my views regarded;-rude hands were taking down the old paintings from my grandfather's room, and the clock ticked louder than ever, as if sorrowing at the bereavement; they all stood huddled together in the corner,-the high book-case frowned from its dark pannels upon the despoilers, and scowled at the sacrilege; and my heart was gladdened in me, as I felt that they could not lessen its height. But alas! "for human wishes, and alas for pride!"—the next time I visited the old place, they had employed a carpenter to transfer its stateliness into the prim coxcombry of a fashionable cabinet! and my heart bled at its mishap! For its dark panels, was substituted patent crown glass,' and the dusty folios, and old modest manuscripts of my grandfather shrunk and shivered in the glare of day. No wonder, then, that my pride was not enough to sustain me in all the difficulties to be encountered by a college tyro. But there was something more than sensibility at work, to make me a laggard at my tasks; it was an utter lack of the appreciation, in me, of the high aims of education. Then, and for months following, did I study under the strange infatuation that my governors were endeavoring to wrest knowledge from me, and that I must as far as consistent with a decent appearance, endeavor to retain it. Strange that the infatuation is so general! I would not ask a question-I would not avail myself of a thousand means of improvement, for the simple reason that I never had realized (and never did till a late hour,) that I was studying for actual service to myself. I may have been wrong, but I had no relish for any of the outward marks of attachment; hence I never had visited among the friends of my youth, or those of later and riper years. I rarely corresponded; my most endearing epithets were cool; I asked no favors; I never complimented nor flattered. I was called an individual of no feelings-yet none throbbed deeper at the tale of suffering, or at the bitter recollection of a family-a nearly related family, in ruins. Oh! God! may be it is well I exhibited no outward tokens of sympathy, but thou knowest the heart. Society-mixed, motley society, were it ever so correct, ever so enchanting, had no charms for me; (and to this may I attribute the salvation of what mind I possess ;) I was never intoxicated in its delights. The softness, the allurements of female loveliness, my nature warned me to look upon as glare-springing not from the heart, but from fashion's tilling. Yet I loved social intercourse; none enjoyed a quiet circle of friends at my country home more than I, for I knew sincerity was there; had it been otherwise, had there been a shadow of a doubt, suspicion would have played the truant with my joys, and I been unhappy. [I am compelled to be egotistical, but this you must tolerate in me, for from the nature of my journal, it will be extremely difficult to alter so materially the phraseology, as to give myself the rank of third person.] I am by nature little communicative, and when interested, an extreme diffidence renders it difficult for me to utter a syllable. Still as I bring my acquaintances forward, those by no means lacking in communicativeness, I hope our conversations may not appear tedious, though they will doubtless seem very strange in print. You will ask, 'what has induced one so unsocial by nature, to unburden himself at length, in this labored and clandestine way?' I answer-it costs me but little labor to transcribe the reflections, and conversations, and incidents recorded on my tablets, to the copy sheet; and I do this clandestinely, as it were, that I may not be tortured with malicious abuse, or flattered by inconsiderate friends, but with a resolution which I possess to a marvelous extent, mingle with my critics, and "If I find the general vogue Pronounces me a stupid rogue, Damns all my thoughts, as low and little,— Swift gives this advice, and I think I can act more in conformance with the spirit of it, than ever did the Dean himself. These opening pages, you will of course expect to be, as far as others are concerned, founded upon observation; but subsequent details, I shall hope to substantiate by actual experience. I I purpose to give no entire and succinct history of my character, but shall suffer it to break forth in my pages as I write. I may perhaps premise that I am not without some degree of taste, and have perhaps unduly valued my tact in looking into the human character, as presented in this miniature world of ours. have perhaps as much genius as the generality of youth-perhaps a little more-but from my ignorance of many forms of the world, and fashions of society, and habits of those around me, the genius I have shines forth much the more conspicuously, and I am inclind to think, that by many, I am thought to have much more originality of mind, than I in reality possess. But enough of this long digression; return with me, reader, to where you saw me wincing under the piercing thrusts of my own sensibility. I had come to college, notwithstanding my ignorance of its true worth-had come with a firm resolution to study steadily and vigorously; my pride sustained the resolution for a time-nothing but pride, and pride broke in upon it, before I had passed a twelvemonth. I could not bear a sneer or smile at my confusion, and my native diffidence soon presented me in any thing but a favorable light in the recitation room. Alas! how I envied the confidence of some rough, hardy sons of New England, brought up in the tanglements and roughnesses of a country life-inured to every toil, and fearful of nothing. I could not equal them; I therefore (I thought) wisely determined to place myself above them. Some were worthy, noble hearted fellows; one, Fred. Thornton, I knew intimately, and he was as good a friend as I made in my college life. I shall have occasion to speak of him often. But there were others, with a show of confidence and conceit, that absolutely disgusted me; and yet, strange as it may seem, that very confidence was a means of their advancement and gain of that notice which they so fondly coveted. They thrust themselves in upon every thing-nothing that they did not know. In politics, literature, morals, they were already adepts; and their opinions of how much worth! Jeffreys, not to say Johnsons! But a mere glance will not serve; I must let their actions show them in coming papers; meantime, requiescant in pace. My recitations, particularly in Greek and mathematics, dragged on, for now I was ashamed to dig; but my tutor was a hard-faced man, and his cool impudence only provoked me to continued neglect. Still, as the worth of things before me expanded more fully in their analytical development, I was alive, in a great measure, to their usefulness; but my pride had before this decided for ignorance, and pride had left a verdict against what my better judgment now saw fitting. It was a rare condiment for fool hardiness, to hear those unable to retain in their brains any appreciable degree of knowledge, declare study'all d-d nonsense!' I well remember how thoughtlessly I looked upon the opinions thus thrown out, in a manner of the utmost effrontery, as of real permanent value, and scrupled not to weigh them in the scale, not only with those of the governors of the institution, but with the decisions of the whole civilized world. There must be that in the manner of instructors to counteract absurd notions, which spread like a contagion, in minds unfit to reason, or few can estimate their pernicious, fatal influences upon the first buddings of education. Indeed, I am thoroughly convinced, from years of intercourse, that if tutors would but throw aside their accursed show of dignity, and be gentlemen for 'ance,' they would gain more friends, make more zealous students, and do more honor to their own characters. Y-, my freshman tutor, was, I have before said, a hard-faced, sour man, exceedingly conscientious, without a tithe of knowledge of the world, and considerably less of human character. I remember my trembling, bashful diffidence when I rose before him to recite, and my words were almost strangled in my throat, through fear of his gross strictures. Nothing I so much dreaded as rebuke before my fellows, and many is the time I have stammered through a passage which I well knew, with my bounding heart almost choking my utterance, overawed alone by his (he thought) witty observations. I never forgave him-never shall forgive him for many of his acts of calculating impudence. In fact, I attributed my growing repugnance to study, and energetic action, more to his manner and character, than to any thing beside. Still, such are but their outcasts. Many a high-souled, nobleminded man has endured the dignity of tutorship, to say the least, with complacency. Such an one it has been my lot to enjoy for a twelvemonth of my college life. His generosity ever struggled with his conscience, and though the latter was always victorious, yet its conquests were ever attended with that affability and unaffected kindness which endeared him strongly to my heart. Nothing proved quite so distressing to my extreme sensibility for a long time after my entrée upon college life, as the attentive observation to which my coat, my cap, my pantaloons, and the cut of my hair, were subjected. In short, I imagined that I was the chief object of attention, in every collection of the 'body collegiate.' |