CHAPTER III.

LETTERS WHILE TUTOR IN COLLEGE.

1824-1825.

PRINCETON, April 21st, 1824.

It is my expectation to leave Trenton to-morrow at 6 A. M in the steamboat, for your city. Without more ado I give you the state of the case. A week ago nothing was further from my intentions, but a few days since I was astounded by the informstion that the trustees of the College had elected me mathematical tutor. This was the more extraordinary as I have already twice, in the most peremptory manner, refused the office; and as the proper complement of officers is now in the faculty, the appointment is extra, and at an unusual time. When I heard it, last Wednesday, my feelings instantly revolted, and I said No with the most perfect determination and confidence. Upon weighing all circumstances, however, and finding upon consulting with my friends that they all, without exception, urged my acceptance, I have determined to enter upon the duties at the commencement of next session. As I have formerly said to you, my youth will permit me to spare two or three years from my theological course, with advantage: I feel, and my friends feel for me, that my mind needs maturing before taking upon me the character of a minister. It is, after all, an odious situation, and I expect it to be, by far, the most trying and mortifying that I have ever been placed in. Yet trials, and self-denial, and mortifications I must expect in almost every situation. I need to be buffeted about a little to call forth what little energy and firmness I may possess. As the session commences just as that of the Seminary closes, I must take my vacation now, or not at all: and my lank and sallow cheeks demand some speedy recreation. It has been long since we saw one another, and each of us has, probably, undergone much change. As for me I fancy that in the prominent traits both of the outer and the inner man, you will find me

much the same boy as ever. I am no son of Anak, and have altered little in dimensions. There was indeed once some glow and bloom of health upon my face, which has departed. I confess, with the confidence of friendship, knowing that it is not exposing myself to ill-timed raillery, that melancholy has secretly and deeply preyed upon my spirits, more than my most intimate friends would judge from my demeanour. Often, the unnatural and excessive gaiety of my manner has been accompanied by bitter gnawings at the soul. From this I suffer less than formerly; nothing at present. My temperament is such that I am susceptible of the most deep emotions of pleasure as well as pain to a great degree, but the pleasure is generally succeeded by a proportionable depression.

PRINCETON, May 14, 1824.

Your communication by [James] Weatherby [of the Seminary] which I received this morning, admitted me to something very like a tête-à-tête with you. A letter, as the thought just now strikes me, should be as nearly as possible the transcript of one's common-talk; or perhaps a better description of a good, that is an acceptable letter, would be that it is a soliloquy in black and white, penned with the freedom of a private meditation, yet written for the eye of another, with whom the disclosures it contains, are just as safe as in their native bosom. It is for answering this description that I like your letters; and, by adhering to the same rule, I have occasionally disgorged to you some of my splenetic moanings. You must take me just as you find me; I don't ask you to pardon my failings; criticize them faithfully; but, prythee, bear with them. When I speak of melancholy to you, I speak of it seriously, and of melancholy in its truest and most appalling shape; not the puling, pensive, pleasing reveries of a moon-struck lover, or a young, novel-reading, boardingschool Miss; but that deep and horrible over-clouding of the soul, which none can understand but those who suffer it, which can be described only by faint and insufficient similitudes, which, until my nervous system received a violent shock, I never knew, and which I do sincerely wish you may always be able, as never shall, to laugh at. Nervous irritability (I am not com- but ex-plaining) I have got in a very fair way by right of primogeniture, and have increased by neglect of proper recreation and exercise.

You know how closely body and soul are united, and how mental and corporeal changes go hand in hand. But perhaps you do not know-and may you never-what it is to feel the whole man in a state of distressing disorder, without knowing whether

the body has communicated the distemper to the mind, or the mind to the body; to feel the tremulous agitation of the whole material fabric of nerves, and the accompanying and more intolerable agitation of spirit, depression, blues, hypochondria, or what you will. Will you smile when I say that to shake off this state of soul-I call it so, for the suffering of body is trifling-is no less impossible than to shake off a fit of the stone? One is equally with the other a disease. Call it, if you please, a disorder of the imagination, and say that it is whim and folly. Granted; and yet it is no less dreadful, far more mortifying, equally beyond the influence of mere resolution. When a withered arm can stretch itself out for relief, then may a diseased mind heal itself. Could I once determine to be placid and cheerful, and so effect a change in the mental state, the cure would be already complete. Enough as to the physiology of the casenow for its reality in my own person. I am more easily excited to pleasure or pain than most persons. My joys are excessive; sometimes a little frantic. The same susceptibility makes me liable to depression from circumstances which would scarcely for a moment rufile the feelings of some; and to depression, sometimes, which has no perceptible cause without. To compare levity and melancholy in a moral point of view, is comparing two sins equally repugnant to the mild placidity and cheerful calm which the truths of the gospel produce on a heart that is exercised aright. The latter afllicts my conscience least, because it is what I loathe, and what I would as joyfully shun as I would a delirium, and which it is just as much in my power to avoid. Undue mirth is a fault which brings with it, to me, its punishment, in the shape of the vapours which follow in its footsteps. Perhaps the words I may have used in a former letter convey to your mind an impression not exactly correct. Forebodings of future pain or misery are not often the subjects of my thoughts, but there comes over my soul, I can no otherwise describe it, a cloud, a blackness, a horror, which tinges every object without or within with a certain indefinable, vague, and terrific darkness; which absorbs the powers of the soul, and seems to concentrate all the faculties upon some hideous something, or nothing, and waste the mental energy in empty musing. I am sometimes months without such a visitation, and sometimes weeks with little else; and my condition has been somewhat this for week past. But peace-let us rise into daylight.

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I might write you a great deal of loose gossip, were it not for my pressing business, and my very, very kind acquaintances, who are too obliging to wait for any hint to come, and too dull to take any hint to go, and who never think of such a query as

"Is he at leisure?" I am indeed laid under the necessity of husbanding every hour. I have scarcely looked at mathematics for a year, and am expected to take the tuition of the Sophomore class, who have been at Algebra all the winter, as well as to induct them into geometry, and the Freshmen into Algebra. The preparation requisite is by no means slight. It is something more than what might enable one to undergo a strict examination upon the several subjects. The instructor must hold himself in continual readiness to detect every error, as soon as made, and to enter immediately into every variety in the mode of demonstration or solution. And, by the bye, the intensity of attention which this will require, in the recitation-room, will equal hours of study in the closet, as to exhaustion of spirits, as well as to improvement of the mind in fixed habits of thought.

The examination of the Theological Seminary is now going on. From this, I am now, as having no further connexion with the Seminary, exempt. Our printing press, though a little thing, is yet a mighty wonder here. The children, great and small, are turning up their eyes, and expanding their palms at the novel sight of "PRINCETON " at the foot of the title-page of a "Report" just printed.

My real troubles commence, unless Providence interpose in an unexpected manner, next Thursday. Then may you expect to hear of cracker-firing, of scraping (do you understand?) of funking, of door-bolting, of ducking, of rope-tripping, of windowbreaking, of all the petty vengeance which unruly striplings wreak on their hapless instructors. My colleague in the tutorship, Mr. Samuel K. Talmage,' made a speech at the Bible So

Now President of Oglethorpe University, Georgia. In a public letter, written in August, 1859, Dr. Talmage says: "We were placed on terms of very intimate intercourse and communion as fellow-tutors during the year 1824. He had become pious since we had parted as students, and I now saw much of his inner life, as he disclosed it but to few. He had grown graver in manner, and somewhat prone to pensiveness of spirit. To the public eye he seemed retiring and apparently distant. But when with a friend in a retired walk, or in the abandon and intimacy of private personal intercourse, he was the most cheerful of companions, abounding in playful remark and discriminating observation. He had a keen relish for the humorous, and a nice appreciation of the virtues and defects of his fellowmen. He had a perfect horror of cant, pretension, bigotry, exclusiveness, and was himself remarkably free from all these failings, thus imparting an irresistible charm to his intercourse with friends.

"His piety was, even at that period, deep toned, and remarkably advanced for one of his age. He was at times overwhelmed with a sense of sinfulness, and has told me that often he could scarcely refrain from crying out in the college chapel from an awful sense of guilt before God, under the pungent appeals of the beloved Professors of the College and Theological Seminary, although he was sitting on the stage before the assembled stu dents as one of the Faculty."

ciety anniversary in New York. How long shall it be before our turn comes?

What think you of the presidential squabble? Jackson brightens wonderfully. His recent letters-I mean his recently published letters, set the man's character in a noble light, and command my highest respect.

Saturday.

My boasting is generally fatal to my hopes, by throwing me off my guard. That cold, or a lincal descendant from it, has come upon me like a strong man armed. I have tried the valiant mode, of defying the cough, and going through thick and thin in spite of it, and the effect has been to fix it deeply in my lungs. I am now reduced to terms of submission, and am driven to the humble mode; i. e. sitting by the fire, keeping out of the wind, drinking teas and slops, and eating pectoral medicaments of various kinds. This regimen, together with an approach to starvation, promises to release me.

The title of an old Scotch song furnishes a key to many of my actions-"For lack of gowd." My temptation to covet greater affluence is small, while I am at home; and even in your city, where baits are hung out everywhere, I presume that habit would soon make me able to withstand their influence. When I look around me at those who have silver and gold always in promptu, I cannot perceive that they are one whit happier than myself. Is, think you, more comfortable and easy, than when his only fortune was his tongue, his whiskers, and his front of brass? These thoughts you will doubtless be wonderfully surprised at, for their originality.

I would not call myself an admirer of the "Lake school of poetry," but I have seen passages in the works both of Coleridge and Wordsworth which have breathed the true spirit of poetry, and gone home-I know not and ask not why-to my inmost soul. If these lines' are not to be found in the "Sybilline Leaves," or perhaps in the "lines upon the vale of Chamouny," which I have not ad unguem, you will find there much that is cast in the same mould. It would be difficult to extract from the Lake-poets a longer passage than this without involving some of their "littlenesses," to use one of their own words, yet a good delectus might be culled out of them of such isolated mor sels. If this little scrap, which, like the mutilated Torse, shows the hand of a master, is American, so much the better. Tell

Referring to some twenty lines of an anonymous quotation on Niagara. They proved to be the American Brainerd's.

"The thoughts are strange which crowd into my brain," &c.