l aversion to all that was coarse, excessive, or impure. But
as his scrupulous personal cleanliness was innate, so also was his
almost maidenly delicacy in matters of morality. Never have I met such
firmness of resolve, never so much masculine energy of intellect,
united to so girlish a reluctance to talk of love and love affairs.
Consequently, he kept aloof from all those clamorous carouses, where,
amidst the fumes of liquor and tobacco, liberty and patriotism, love
and friendship, God and immortality, are in their turns, discussed on
the same broad basis of easy joviality as the last ball, or the newest
cut of College cap. Even in a tete a tete, where he could so eloquently
hold forth on any scientific problem, he very rarely touched on
questions dealing with the most private and personal interests of man.
History, diplomacy, politics, or the classics, were subjects he would
discuss with passionate eagerness. Then he could wax as warm and fluent
in debate, as though he were addressing a listening nation he would
have won to some great purpose. To things of common life, he rarely
referred. Of his own family, I never heard him speak. His father, he
mentioned only once.

One evening, when I went to ask him whether he would join me in a row
upon the river;--in one of those excursions of which he was so fond,
when we used to take a little boat to a tavern a mile or two below the
town, and, after a frugal meal, to walk home by starlight;--I found him
just as he had thrown aside his pen, and was struggling with the
resolution necessary to dress for an evening party.

"Pity me!" he cried, as I came in; "only look at that magnificent
sunset, and imagine that I am doomed to turn my back upon it, and to go
where I shall see no other midnight splendour but that of the stars on
dress-coats!"

And he mentioned one of the most distinguished houses in the town,
where a party was to be given in honor of some passing diplomate.

"And must you?"--I asked, with sincerest sympathy. For all our
intimacy, we had never come to saying thou.--

"I must," he sighed; "my father, who has set his heart on making a
diplomate of me, whether I will or no, would be indignant if I were to
go home without being able to inform him, whether the suppers at Baron
N.'s are still such as to justify their European reputation. Hitherto,
I have been so culpable as to ignore them, and now, at the last, I have
to fill up these blanks in my course of study."