are opened to the soul, and genius lifts its wings with divine assurance.
If this is true, the contrary must take place wherever the external life
is more and more exalted, where the token supersedes more and more the
essence, the symbol and the external work the inner act and conscience,
where the superficies is taken for the content, the outer monotony for
life's uniformity, and appearances for truth. There a luckless future is
in waiting, whatever be the aspect of the present."
III.
THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.
We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now
and then issuing into some open space before a guild-hall or a church. The
objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or
reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and
humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search
for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings
of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the
corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The
lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing
the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to
the temples of knowledge at the portals of which flocks of students wait.
We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look
as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their
hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that
the walls by which they wait are the propylæa to all the secrets of earth
and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined
one day to shine as lights in the Church and in the domain of science,
whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over their _catenæ_,
their _summæ_ and _sententiæ_, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction
the precious weight of _terms_ which lifts them so conspicuously above the
ignorant mass of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still
fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the
far-famed third class of students, adventurers assembled from all quarters
under the protection of university-privileges,--those gentlemen with
bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with
terribly long and broad swords dangling at their side,--the heroes of
that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds
enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day
the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very
severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet
their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or as _scholares
vagantes_ in the ditch or by the roadside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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