Loves Pilgrimage | Page 6

were a mockery of all the joys
of life.

So Corydon devoured her own heart in secret; and in time a dreadful
thing came to happen--the stagnant soul beginning to fester. One day
the girl, whose heart was the quintessence of all innocence, happened to
see a low word scribbled upon a fence. And now--they had urged her to
discover sins, and she discovered them. Suppose that word were to stay
in her mind and haunt her--suppose that she were not able to forget it,
try as she would! And of course she tried; and the more she tried, the
less she succeeded; and so came the discovery that she was a lost soul
and a creature of depravity! The thought occurred to her, that she might
go on to think of other words, and to think of images and actions as
well; she might be unable to forget any of them--her mind might
become a storehouse of such horrors! And so the maiden out of ancient
Greece would lie awake all night and wrestle with fiends, until she was
bathed in a perspiration.
Section 5. About this time Thyrsis was making his _début_ as an author.
He had discovered a curious knack in himself, a turn for making verses
of a sort which were pleasing to children. They came from some little
corner of his consciousness, he scarcely knew how; but there was a
paper that was willing to buy them, and to pay him the princely sum of
five dollars a week! This would pay for his food and his hall bedroom,
or for board at some farm in the summer; and so for several years
Thyrsis was free.
He told a falsehood about his age, and entered college, and buried
himself up to the eyes in work. This was a college in a city, and a poor
college, where the students all lived at home, and had nothing to do but
study; and so Thyrsis missed all that beneficent illumination known as
"student-life." He never hurrahed at foot-ball contests, nor did he dress
himself in honorific garments, nor stupify himself at "smokers." Being
democratic, and without thought of setting himself up over others, he
was unaware of his greatest opportunities, and when they invited him
into a fraternity, he declined. Once or twice he found himself roaming
the streets at night with a crowd of students, emitting barbaric
screechings; but this made him feel silly, and so he lagged behind and
went home.

The college served its purpose, in introducing him to the world of
knowledge; but that did not take long, and afterwards it was all in his
way. The mathematics were a discipline, and in them he rejoiced as a
strong man to run a race; and this was true also of the sciences, and of
history--the only trouble was that he would finish the text-books in the
first few weeks, and after that there was nothing to do save to compose
verses in class, and to make sketches of the professors. But as for the
"languages" and the "literatures" they taught him--in the end Thyrsis
came to forgive them, because he saw that they did not know what
languages and literatures were. On this account he took to begging
leave of absence on grounds of his poverty; and then he would go home
and spend his days and nights in learning.
One could get so much for so little, in this wonderful world of mind!
For eight cents he picked up a paper volume of Emerson's "Essays";
and in this shrewd and practical nobility was so much that he was
seeking in life! And then he stumbled upon a fifteen-cent edition of
"Sartor Resartus", and took that home and read it. It was like the clash
of trumpets and cymbals to him; it made his whole being leap. Hour
after hour he read, breathless, like a man bewitched, the whole night
through. He would cry aloud with delight, or drop the book and pound
his knee and laugh over the demoniac power of it. The next day he
began the "French Revolution"; and after that, alas, he found there was
no more--for Carlyle had turned his back upon democracy, and so
Thyrsis turned his back upon Carlyle.
For this was one of the forces which had had to do with the shaping of
his thought. Beginning in the public-schools he had learned about his
country--the country which was his, if not Corydon's. He had read in its
history--Irving's "Life of Washington," and ten great volumes about
Lincoln; so he had come to understand that salvation is of the people,
and that those things which the people do not do--those things have not
yet been done. So no one could deceive him, or lead him astray; he