You get an exalted idea of that uncertain quality which turns the heads of a vast many of your fellows, called—­Genius.  An odd notion seems to be inherent in the atmosphere of those college chambers, that there is a certain faculty of mind—­first developed, as would seem, in colleges—­which accomplishes whatever it chooses without any special painstaking.  For a time you fall yourself into this very unfortunate hallucination; you cultivate it after the usual college fashion, by drinking a vast deal of strong coffee and whiskey-toddy, by writing a little poor verse in the Byronic temper, and by studying very late at night with closed blinds.

It costs you however more anxiety and hypocrisy than you could possibly have believed.

——­You will learn, Clarence, when the Autumn has rounded your hopeful Summer, if not before, that there is no Genius in life like the Genius of energy and industry.  You will learn, that all the traditions so current among very young men that certain great characters have wrought their greatness by an inspiration, as it were, grow out of a sad mistake.

And you will further find, when you come to measure yourself with men, that there are no rivals so formidable as those earnest, determined minds which reckon the value of every hour, and which achieve eminence by persistent application.

Literary ambition may inflame you at certain periods and a thought of some great names will flash like a spark into the mine of your purposes; you dream till midnight over books; you set up shadows, and chase them down,—­other shadows, and they fly.  Dreaming will never catch them.  Nothing makes the “scent lie well” in the hunt after distinction, but labor.

And it is a glorious thing, when once you are weary of the dissipation, and the ennui of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing page of an earnest thinker, and read—­deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat.  And away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seemed so crude.  The glow of toil wakes you to the consciousness of your real capacities:  you feel sure that they have taken a new step toward final development.  In such mood it is that one feels grateful to the musty tomes, which at other hours stand like wonder-making mummies with no warmth and no vitality.  Now they grow into the affections like new-found friends, and gain a hold upon the heart, and light a fire in the brain, that the years and the mould cannot cover nor quench.

III.

College Romance.

In following the mental vagaries of youth, I must not forget the curvetings and wiltings of the heart.