With one more yearning look at the gray hulks of building, you loiter away under the trees. The monster elms, which have bowered your proud steps through four years of proudest life, lift up to the night their rounded canopy of leaves with a quiet majesty that mocks you. They kiss the same calm sky which they wooed four years ago; and they droop their trailing limbs lovingly to the same earth, which has steadily and quietly wrought in them their stature and their strength. Only here and there you catch the loitering footfall of some other benighted dreamer, strolling around the vast quadrangle of level green, which lies, like a prairie-child, under the edging shadows of the town. The lights glimmer one by one; and one by one, like breaking hopes, they fade away from the houses. The full-risen moon, that dapples the ground beneath the trees, touches the tall church-spires with silver, and slants their loftiness--as memory slants grief--in long, dark, tapering lines upon the silvered Green. 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.