IV.

First Look at the World.

Our Clarence is now fairly afloat upon the swift tide of Youth.  The thrall of teachers is ended, and the audacity of self-resolve is begun.  It is not a little odd, that, when we have least strength to combat the world, we have the highest confidence in our ability.

Very few individuals in the world possess that happy consciousness of their own prowess which belongs to the newly-graduated collegian.  He has most abounding faith in the tricksy panoply that he has wrought out of the metal of his Classics.  His Mathematics, he has not a doubt, will solve for him every complexity of life’s questions; and his Logic will as certainly untie all Gordian knots, whether in politics or ethics.

He has no idea of defeat; he proposes to take the world by storm; he half wonders that quiet people are not startled by his presence.  He brushes with an air of importance about the halls of country hotels; he wears his honor at the public tables; he fancies that the inattentive guests can have little idea that the young gentleman, who so recently delighted the public ear with his dissertation on the “General Tendency of Opinion,” is actually among them, and quietly eating from the same dish of beef and of pudding!

Our poor Clarence does not know—­Heaven forbid he should!—­that he is but little wiser now than when he turned his back upon the old Academy, with its gallipots and broken retorts; and that with the addition of a few Greek roots, a smattering of Latin, and some readiness of speech, he is almost as weak for breasting the strong current of life as when a boy.  America is but a poor place for the romantic book-dreamer.  The demands of this new, Western life of ours are practical and earnest.  Prompt action, and ready tact, are the weapons by which to meet it, and subdue it.  The education of the cloister offers at best only a sound starting-point from which to leap into the tide.

The father of Clarence is a cool, matter-of-fact man.  He has little sympathy with any of the romantic notions that enthrall a youth of twenty.  He has a very humble opinion—­much humbler than you think he should have—­of your attainments at college.  He advises a short period of travel, that by observation you may find out more fully how that world is made up with which you are henceforth to struggle.

Your mother half fears your alienation from the affections of home.  Her letters all run over with a tenderness that makes you sigh, and that makes you feel a deep reproach.  You may not have been wanting in the more ordinary tokens of affection; you have made your periodic visits; but you blush for the consciousness that fastens on you of neglect at heart.  You blush for the lack of that glow of feeling which once fastened to every home-object.

[Does a man indeed outgrow affections as his mind ripens?  Do the early and tender sympathies become a part of his intellectual perceptions, to be appreciated and reasoned upon as one reasons about truths of science?  Is their vitality necessarily young?  Is there the same ripe, joyous burst of the heart at the recollection of later friendships, which belonged to those of boyhood; and are not the later ones more the suggestions of judgment, and less the absolute conditions of the heart’s health?]