In following the mental vagaries of youth, I must not forget the curvetings and wiltings of the heart.

The black-eyed Jenny, with whom a correspondence at red heat was kept up for several weeks, is long before this entirely out of your regard,—not so much by reason of the six months' disparity of age, as from the fact, communicated quite confidentially by the travelled Nat, that she has had a desperate flirtation with a handsome midshipman. The conclusion is natural that she is an inconstant, cruel-hearted creature, with little appreciation of real worth; and furthermore, that all midshipmen are a very contemptible—not to say dangerous—set of men. She is consigned to forgetfulness and neglect; and the late lover has long ago consoled himself by reading in a spirited way that passage of Childe Harold commencing,—

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me."

As for Madge, the memory of her has been more wakeful, but less violent. To say nothing of occasional returns to the old homestead, when you have met her Nelly's letters not unfrequently drop a careless half-sentence that keeps her strangely in mind.

"Madge," she says, "is sitting by me with her work;" or, "You ought to see the little silk purse that Madge is knitting;" or,—speaking of some country rout,—"Madge was there in the sweetest dress you can imagine." All this will keep Madge in mind; not, it is true, in the ambitious moods, or in the frolics with Dalton; but in those odd half-hours that come stealing over one at twilight, laden with sweet memories of the days of old.

A new romantic admiration is started by those pale lady-faces which light up on a Sunday the gallery of the college chapel. An amiable and modest fancy gives to them all a sweet classic grace. The very atmosphere of these courts, wakened with high metaphysic discourse, seems to lend them a Greek beauty and fineness; and you attach to the prettiest, that your eye can reach, all the charms of some Sciote maiden, and all the learning of her father—the professor. And as you lie half-wakeful and half-dreaming, through the long Divisions of the Doctor's morning discourse, the twinkling eyes in some corner of the gallery bear you pleasant company as you float down those streaming visions which radiate from you far over the track of the coming life.

But following very closely upon this comes a whole volume of street romance. There are prettily shaped figures that go floating at convenient hours for college observation along the thoroughfares of the town. And these figures come to be known, and the dresses, and the streets; and even the door-plate is studied. The hours are ascertained, by careful observation and induction, at which some particular figure is to be met,—or is to be seen at some low parlor-window, in white summer dress, with head leaning on the hand, very melancholy, and very dangerous. Perhaps her very card is stuck proudly into a corner of the mirror in the college-chamber. After this may come moonlight meetings at the gate, or long listenings to the plaintive lyrics that steal out of the parlor-windows, and that blur wofully the text of the Conic Sections.

Or perhaps she is under the fierce eye of some Cerberus of a schoolmistress, about whose grounds you prowl piteously, searching for small knot-holes in the surrounding board fence, through which little souvenirs of impassioned feeling may be thrust. Sonnets are written for the town papers, full of telling phrases, and with classic allusions and foot-notes which draw attention to some similar felicity of expression in Horace or Ovid. Correspondence may even be ventured on, enclosing locks of hair, and interchanging rings, and paper oaths of eternal fidelity.

But the old Cerberus is very wakeful: the letters fail; the lamp that used to glimmer for a sign among the sycamores is gone out; a stolen wave of a handkerchief, a despairing look, and tears,—which you fancy, but do not see,—make you miserable for long days.

The tyrant teacher, with no trace of compassion in her withered heart, reports you to the college authorities. There is a long lecture of admonition upon the folly of such dangerous practices; and if the offence be aggravated by some recent joviality with Dalton and the Senior, you are condemned to a month of exile with a country clergyman. There are a few tearful regrets over the painful tone of the home letters; but the bracing country air, and the pretty faces of the village girls, heal your heart—with fresh wounds.

The old Doctor sees dimly through his spectacles; and his pew gives a good look-out upon the smiling choir of singers. A collegian wears the honors of a stranger, and the country bucks stand but poor chance in contrast with your wonderful attainments in cravats and verses. But this fresh dream, odorous with its memories of sleigh-rides or lilac-blossoms, slips by, and yields again to the more ambitious dreams of the cloister.

In the prouder moments that come when you are more a man and less a boy,—with more of strategy and less of faith,—your thought of woman runs loftily; not loftily in the realm of virtue or goodness, but loftily on your new world-scale. The pride of intellect, that is thirsting in you, fashions ideal graces after a classic model. The heroines of fable are admired; and the soul is tortured with that intensity of passion which gleams through the broken utterances of Grecian tragedy.

In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart. You turn away from all such with a sigh of conceit, to graze on that lofty but bitter pasturage where no daisies grow. Admiration may be called up by some graceful figure that you see moving under those sweeping elms; and you follow it with an intensity of look that makes you blush, and straightway hide the memory of the blush by summing up some artful sophistry, that resolves your delighted gaze into a weakness, and your contempt into a virtue.

But this cannot last. As the years drop off, a certain pair of eyes beam one day upon you that seem to have been cut out of a page of Greek poetry. They have all its sentiment, its fire, its intellectual reaches: it would be hard to say what they have not. The profile is a Greek profile, and the heavy chestnut hair is plaited in Greek bands. The figure, too, might easily be that of Helen, or of Andromache.

You gaze, ashamed to gaze; and your heart yearns, ashamed of its yearning. It is no young girl who is thus testing you: there is too much pride for that. A ripeness and maturity rest upon her look and figure that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have wrought out of the Grecian heaven. The vision steals upon you at all hours,—now rounding its flowing outline to the mellifluous metre of Epic hexameter, and again with its bounding life pulsating with the glorious dashes of tragic verse.

Yet with the exception of stolen glances and secret admiration, you keep aloof. There is no wish to fathom what seems a happy mystery. There lies a content in secret obeisance. Sometimes it shames you, as your mind glows with its fancied dignity; but the heart thrusts in its voice; and, yielding to it, you dream dreams like fond old Boccaccio's upon the olive-shaded slopes of Italy. The tongue even is not trusted with the thoughts that are seething within: they begin and end in the voiceless pulsations of your nature.

After a time—it seems a long time, but it is in truth a very short time—you find who she is who is thus entrancing you. It is done most carelessly. No creature could imagine that you felt any interest in the accomplished sister—of your friend Dalton. Yet it is even she who has thus beguiled you; and she is at least some ten years Dalton's senior, and by even more years—your own!

It is singular enough, but it is true, that the affections of that transition state from youth to manliness run toward the types of maturity. The mind in its reaches toward strength and completeness creates a heart-sympathy—which in its turn craves fulness. There is a vanity too about the first steps of manly education, which is disposed to underrate the innocence and unripened judgment of the other sex. Men see the mistake as they grow older; for the judgment of a woman, in all matters of the affections, ripens by ten years faster than a man's.

In place of any relentings on such score you are set on fire anew. The stories of her accomplishments, and of her grace of conversation, absolutely drive you mad. You watch your occasion for meeting her upon the street. You wonder if she has any conception of your capacity for mental labor, and if she has any adequate idea of your admiration for Greek poetry, and for herself.

You tie your cravat poet-wise, and wear broad collars turned down, wondering how such disposition may affect her. Her figure and step become a kind of moving romance to you, drifting forward and outward into that great land of dreams which you call the world. When you see her walking with others, you pity her, and feel perfectly sure, that, if she had only a hint of that intellectual fervor which in your own mind blazes up at the very thought of her, she would perfectly scorn the stout gentleman who spends his force in tawdry compliments.

A visit to your home wakens ardor by contrast as much as by absence. Madge, so gentle, and now stealing sly looks at you in a way so different from her hoidenish manner of school-days, you regard complacently as a most lovable, fond girl,—the very one for some fond and amiable young man whose soul is not filled, as yours is, with higher things! To Nelly, earnestly listening, you drop only exaggerated hints of the wonderful beauty and dignity of this new being of your fancy. Of her age you scrupulously say nothing.

The trivialities of Dalton amaze you: it is hard to understand how a man within the limit of such influences as Miss Dalton must inevitably exert, can tamely sit down to a rubber of whist, and cigars! There must be a sad lack of congeniality;—it would certainly be a proud thing to supply that lack!

The new feeling, wild and vague as it is,—for as yet you have only most casual acquaintance with Laura Dalton,—invests the whole habit of your study; not quickening overmuch the relish for Dugald Stewart, or the miserable skeleton of college Logic, but spending a sweet charm upon the graces of Rhetoric and the music of Classic Verse. It blends harmoniously with your quickened ambition. There is some last appearance that you have to make upon the college stage, in the presence of the great worthies of the State, and of all the beauties of the town,—Laura chiefest among them. In view of it you feel dismally intellectual. Prodigious faculties are to be brought to the task.

You think of throwing out ideas that will quite startle His Excellency the Governor, and those very distinguished public characters whom the college purveyors vote into their periodic public sittings. You are quite sure of surprising them, and of deeply provoking such scheming, shallow politicians as have never read Wayland's "Treatise," and who venture incautiously within hearing of your remarks. You fancy yourself in advance the victim of a long leader in the next day's paper, and the thoughtful but quiet cause of a great change in the political programme of the State. But crowning and eclipsing all the triumph, are those dark eyes beaming on you from some corner of the church their floods of unconscious praise and tenderness.

Your father and Nelly are there to greet you. He has spoken a few calm, quiet words of encouragement, that make you feel—very wrongfully—that he is a cold man, with no earnestness of feeling. As for Nelly, she clasps your arm with a fondness, and with a pride, that tell at every step her praises and her love.

But even this, true and healthful as it is, fades before a single word of commendation from the new arbitress of your feeling. You have seen Miss Dalton! You have met her on that last evening of your cloistered life in all the elegance of ball-costume; your eye has feasted on her elegant figure, and upon her eye sparkling with the consciousness of beauty. You have talked with Miss Dalton about Byron, about Wordsworth, about Homer. You have quoted poetry to Miss Dalton; you have clasped Miss Dalton's hand!

Her conversation delights you by its piquancy and grace; she is quite ready to meet you (a grave matter of surprise!) upon whatever subject you may suggest. You lapse easily and lovingly into the current of her thought, and blush to find yourself vacantly admiring when she is looking for reply. The regard you feel for her resolves itself into an exquisite mental love, vastly superior, as you think, to any other kind of love. There is no dream of marriage as yet, but only of sitting beside her in the moonlight during a countless succession of hours, and talking of poetry and nature, of destiny and love.

Magnificent Miss Dalton!

----And all the while vaunting youth is almost mindless of the presence of that fond Nelly whose warm sisterly affection measures itself hopefully against the proud associations of your growing years,—and whose deep, loving eye, half suffused with its native tenderness, seems longing to win you back to the old joys of that Home-love, which linger on the distant horizon of your boyhood like the golden glories of a sinking day.

As the night wanes, you wander for a last look toward the dingy walls that have made for you so long a home. The old broken expectancies, the days of glee, the triumphs, the rivalries, the defeats, the friendships, are recalled with a fluttering of the heart that pride cannot wholly subdue. You step upon the chapel-porch in the quiet of the night as you would step on the graves of friends. You pace back and forth in the wan moonlight, dreaming of that dim life which opens wide and long from the morrow. The width and length oppress you: they crush down your struggling self-consciousness like Titans dealing with Pygmies. A single piercing thought of the vast and shadowy future, which is so near, tears off on the instant all the gewgaws of pride, strips away the vanity that doubles your bigness, and forces you down to the bare nakedness of what you truly are!

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.