But we must
be satisfied with the quick and sympathetic insight with which
Hawthorne's friend discovered his true bent. The world owes more,
probably, to this early encouragement from a college companion than it
can ever estimate.
Nothing in human intercourse, I think, has a more peculiar and
unchanging value than the mutual impressions of young men at college:
they meet at a moment when the full meaning of life just begins to
unfold itself to them, and their fresh imaginations build upon two or
three traits the whole character of a comrade, where a maturer man
weighs and waits, doubts and trusts, and ends after all with a like or
dislike that is only lukewarm. Far on toward the close of life,
Hawthorne, in speaking of something told him by an English gentleman
respecting a former classmate of the latter's, wrote: "It seemed to be
one of those early impressions which a collegian gets of his
fellow-students, and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character
of the person may turn out to be in after years. I have judged several
persons in this way, and still judge them so, though the world has come
to very different opinions. Which is right,--the world, which has the
man's whole mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has
nothing for it but some idle passages of his youth?" The world,
doubtless, measures more accurately the intrinsic worth of the man's
mature actions; but his essential characteristics, creditable or
otherwise, are very likely to be better understood by his classmates.
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