of their retreat there
goes a light--from the silence of their studies there issues a voice, to
illumine or convince. We can imagine them looking from their privations
to the far visions of the future, and hugging to their hearts, in the
strength of no unnatural vanity, the reward which their labours are
certain hereafter to obtain. To those who can anticipate the vast
dominions of immortality among men, what boots the sterility of
the cabined and petty present? But the mere man of languages and
learning--the machine of a memory heavily but unprofitably employed--the
Columbus wasting at the galley oar the energies which should have
discovered a world--for him there is no day-dream of the future, no
grasp at the immortality of fame. Beyond the walls of his narrow room he
knows no object; beyond the elucidation of a dead tongue he indulges no
ambition; his life is one long school-day of lexicons and grammars--a
fabric of ice, cautiously excluded from a single sunbeam--elaborately
useless, ingeniously unprofitable; and leaving at the moment it melts
away, not a single trace of the space it occupied, or the labour it
cost.

At the time I went to the University, my poor collegian had attained all
the honours his employment could ever procure him. He had been a Pitt
scholar; he was a senior wrangler, and a Fellow of his college. It often
happened that I found myself next to him at dinner, and I was struck by
his abstinence, and pleased with his modesty, despite of the gaucherie
of his manner, and the fashion of his garb. By degrees I insinuated
myself into his acquaintance; and, as I had still some love of
scholastic lore, I took frequent opportunities of conversing with him
upon Horace, and consulting him upon Lucian.

Many a dim twilight have we sat together, reviving each other's
recollection, and occasionally relaxing into the grave amusement of
capping verses. Then, if by any chance my ingenuity or memory enabled
me to puzzle my companion, his good temper would lose itself in a quaint
pettishness, or he would cite against me some line of Aristophanes,
and ask me, with a raised voice, and arched brow, to give him a fitting
answer to that. But if, as was much more frequently the case, he fairly
run me down into a pause and confession of inability, he would rub his
hands with a strange chuckle, and offer me, in the bounteousness of his
heart, to read aloud a Greek Ode of his own, while he treated me "to
a dish of tea." T