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.

IV.

_First Look at the World._

Our Clarence is now fairly afloat upon the swift tide of Youth. The
thrall of teachers is ended, and the audacity of self-resolve is begun.
It is not a little odd, that, when we have least strength to combat the
world, we have the highest confidence in our ability.

Very few individuals in the world possess that happy consciousness of
their own prowess which belongs to the newly-graduated collegian. He has
most abounding faith in the tricksy panoply that he has wrought out of
the metal of his Classics. His Mathematics, he has not a doubt, will
solve for him every complexity of life's questions; and his Logic will
as certainly untie all Gordian knots, whether in politics or ethics.

He has no idea of defeat; he proposes to take the world by storm; he
half wonders that quiet people are not startled by his presence. He
brushes with an air of importance about the halls of country hotels; he
wears his honor at the public tables; he fancies that the inattentive
guests can have little idea that the young gentleman, who so recently
delighted the public ear with his dissertation on the "General Tendency
of Opinion," is actually among them, and quietly eating from the same
dish of beef and of pudding!

Our poor Clarence does not know--Heaven forbi