They call other rolls now in chapel and in class-room,
and chant other songs at their revels and their feasts. '_Eheu,
Posthume!_'"
"Pshaw, Ned Blount! there's corn in Egypt still. Out of that bug-riddled
old barn we used to know a new and comely Phoenix has been born unto
Princeton; the fire hath purged, not destroyed; and we wiseacres who
flourished in the old 'flush times' yet survive in tradition, patterns for
our children, very Turveydrops of collegiate deportment. The belfry clangs
with a louder peal; even Clarian's Picture, though it hath utterly perished
to the eye of sense, lives vivid in a thousand memories, and, having found
in the tenderness of tradition and legend an engraver whose burin is as
faithful as Raphael Morghen's, has left the damp dark wall, like Leonardo's
_Cenacolo_, to accompany all of us to our firesides."
Clarian's Picture! what memories the mention of it stirred up!
"Poor Clarian!" I murmured.
"Poor, indeed I" repeated Mac, with a sneer. "He is only worth a lovely
wife and six children, with half a million to back them. And he only weighs
two hundred pounds, with I forget how many inches of fat over the
brisket. Poor, indeed! 'Tis pity you and I have not experienced a slight
attack of that same poverty, Ned Blount!"
"Poor Clarian!" repeated I, sturdily. "To think that a man who could paint
such a picture, a soul of imagination so compact, a so delicate
ether-breathing spirit, should settle down at last into a mere mechanical,
a plodding, every-day merchant, whose finest fancies are given to the
condition of the money-market, who governs his actions by a decline of
Erie, and narrows his ideas down to the requirements of filthy lucre, like
a mere 'wintry clod of earth'! Ay, poor Clarian, poor anybody, when we wake
from our bright youth-dream and tread the rough pathway of a reality like
this!"
"_Potz tausend_! the man is _fou_!" shouted Mac.
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