Part 37 (1/2)

G.o.d bless the College! How she there Stands in her stately grandeur fair!

Ye twilight halls, both great and small, Ye win me back no more at all.

And thou too, from thy gabled height, O Carcer! see'st in vain my flight, For wretched lodging, night and day, A Pereat, greet thee thus for aye!

But bloom thou--and, as thus I go, Old Battle-house, still ”Live thou, hoch!”

Yet many a victor-garland be, Thou house of honour, won in thee!

Then come I--ah! to Liebchen's door,-- Look out, dear girl, look out once more!

Look out with thy sweet eyes so clear, And with thy dark and cl.u.s.tering hair.

And shouldst thou e'en have me forgot, A like reward I wish thee not.

Go, thou mayst seek a lover new, But be he gay, like me, and true.

But farther, farther, now awaits My course, stand wide ye ancient gates!

Light is my heart, and glad my track; My blessing, city, waft I back!

Ye Brothers! now, around me press, Let my heart feel not its distress.

On gallant steeds with gladsome song, Go ye with me the way along.

In the next Dorf will we alight, In our last wine our friends.h.i.+p plight.

Now, here ye Brothers,--wo's the case!-- Our last gla.s.s take!--our last embrace!

_Gustav. Schwab_.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE STUDENT'S FUNERAL, ETC.

And of our brethren, is there one departed-- By pale Death summoned in his bloom?

We weep, and wish him peace, all saddest hearted; Peace to our brother's silent tomb.

We weep, and wish that peace may dwell In our dear brother's silent cell.

”What becomes then of the student at the last?” the reader will ask--”of him whom we have to this point followed in silent observation through all his ways, and along his whole course?”

If, as has often been the case, we were to consider the Student-life as a disease, we should say with the Pathologist:--”Every disease can, by possibility, have, only one of three terminations: the first, in health; the second, in some other disease; and the last, in death.” But we are far from looking upon it in this light. Yet we can, regarding the Student-life in its great outlines as a state of health, a.s.sign it the same issues, with the exception that we hold the Philisterium, to use the student's own language, to be the natural sequence of the natural university life.

It is truly a sorrowful reflection, that of the numbers who seek the university at the same time, it is only the smaller portion of them who reach that goal after which they strive, or should strive. Not that we mean to say that death s.n.a.t.c.hes away so many from the midst of them.

No; the mortality in general, and especially in Heidelberg, amongst the student youth, is very small indeed. But what we now have in our eye will be more clearly shown, if we explain ourselves on the nature of the object to be attained by the student. Has he, indeed, attained that object, when he has piled up in his head laboriously and without order, a store of things worthy to be known in his peculiar profession? No, that is not it; although people who are dest.i.tute of an enlightened grasp of mind, are accustomed to see great perfection in the education of a young man who, returning from a learned inst.i.tution, is found to have gathered up all facts like a schoolboy with amazing diligence, so that when any one says A to him, he can immediately say B and C. We believe, for our part, the fruit of inquiry to be this: that the young man learns to perceive that the individual study to which he especially devotes himself, is only one branch of the great tree of knowledge; that no science, sundered entirely from the rest, can proceed prosperously to its own completion; that a science pursued alone and in an isolated manner, cannot be properly called a science; but that all the sciences stretch forth their sisterly hands to each other, and form themselves into a beautiful circle, out of which they will not suffer themselves to be torn by an unskilful person.

He will perceive, that a well-grounded study of professional science even, can only base itself on a philosophical foundation; and that he who, on the contrary, falls into one-sidedness, must become merely a clever plodder, or a charlatan. He will perceive that the arts and sciences are as intimately connected, as the capacity for the true, the good, and the beautiful is united in the spirit of man with the understanding. But is there one who has acquired no single perception of all this; has he only crammed into his head the dusty chaff of learning; has he, in the acquisition of this false learning, lost the taste for all that is good and beautiful!--it had been better that he had never entered on this field, which for him has had no result but that of drying up his brain with the heat of a confused and unfruitful knowledge.

Truly, there are yet other results of student-life than such as these: namely, those of a spurious erudition; results which for the quondam student, are yet more sorrowful, and which fill the heart of the spectator with pity and abhorrence. We mean the consequences which habits of drinking, and of other wild practices--such as the miserable pa.s.sion for play, draw after them. It is true that we see many wretched creatures glide trembling about, who have laid the first foundations of their aberrations at their university. But we see equally many, or more such miserables, who never visited such an inst.i.tution: and if we find many sorrowful histories in the university city, of the students who had taken their own lives because they had plunged themselves into inextricable debt; if we hear many a one at the end of his academical career lament bitterly over his lost and misspent time; we may be seized with a horror of such places as strong, as when we read what Jean Paul has depicted in such fearful colours of a similar unfortunate:--”And he brought out of the whole rich life nothing but errors, sins and diseases; a wasted body and a weary soul; a breast full of poison and an age full of remorse. His beautiful youthful days now changed themselves into spectres, and dragged him back to that sweet morning where his father had first placed him, at the point of the diverging paths of life, the right hand of which leads into the sun-path of virtue, into a wide quiet land, full of light and of harvest-fields, and of angels; and that of the left conducts down through the mole-burrowings of crime, into a black cavern full of down-dropping poison, of darting snakes, and of a damp and sultry vapour. Ah! the snakes hang on his bosom, and the poison drops on his tongue, and--he knew where he was. Wild, and with inexpressible horror and anguish, he cried to heaven--'Give me my youth again! O Father!