of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to
the consciousness of your real capacities: you feel sure that they have
taken a new step toward final development. In such mood it is that one
feels grateful to the musty tomes, which at other hours stand like
wonder-making mummies with no warmth and no vitality. Now they grow into
the affections like new-found friends, and gain a hold upon the heart,
and light a fire in the brain, that the years and the mould cannot cover
nor quench.

III.

_College Romance._

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
pret