From the Easy Chair, Volume 2Curtis, George William
General
From the Easy Chair, Volume 2
Curtis, George William
American essays
Kind sir of the college, who lend to the preacher of the moment your
listening ear, the preacher himself may be a wearisome chaplain, but you
are the young judge of the summer afternoon, smelling the meadows sweet
with hay, and stopping at the cool spring where Maud Muller hands you
the refreshing draught. Do you follow the allegory, and see in that maid
what really she is? To you she is a maiden who rakes the hay; to Numa
she was Egeria by the other fountain. It is a sweet illusion, for the
maid is not Egeria nor Maud Muller, but under those gentle forms she is
the nymph of opportunity. Woo her and win her, and all the happiness
that might have been will be yours.
There is nothing more touching than the inability of the chooser to
comprehend the choice. Why did not the judge yield to the soft
persuasion of that simple loveliness? Why did he not embrace the
opportunity, and fold his happiness to his heart? Well, sir, that is
always the question. But if he did not know that in that fair figure
opportunity stood before him, you do know it. Don't be satisfied to hum
"in court an old love tune." You remember the legend of the Sibyl's
books. Was it interpreted to you in the class-room? Do you interpret it
to yourself?
The most inspiring tradition in every college is not that of the boat or
the ball, of copious gold and flowing wine, of Milo or Sardanapalus or
Midas; it is not that of the "dig" or the "prig," of Dryasdust or
Casaubon; but it is that of the youth, by whatever name he was called in
your college, who did not, like the judge, "closing his heart," ride
on--who knew that four such years as yours in college would never
return, and that they offered him the golden keys which, polished by his
labor, would open the heaped treasures of genius in all ages and lands.
It is he who in taking the keys did not grudge the labor, and to whose
life those treasures have been wide open.
No, the inspiring personal tradition of college was not the pleasant
Philip Slingsby; it was rather Philip Sidney, who rode with the best
and was a man in every manly enterprise, but who had so used his
opportunities in study and affairs that Hubert Languet, most
accomplished of scholars, called him friend, and William of Orange
called him master.
THE STREETS OF NEW YORK.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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