in his
pensiveness, unmindful of another pensive figure near--a young gentleman
with a swan-neck, wearing a lady-like open shirt collar, thrown back,
and tied with a black ribbon. From a square, tableted-broach, curiously
engraved with Greek characters, he seemed a collegian--not improbably, a
sophomore--on his travels; possibly, his first. A small book bound in
Roman vellum was in his hand.

Overhearing his murmuring neighbor, the youth regarded him with some
surprise, not to say interest. But, singularly for a collegian, being
apparently of a retiring nature, he did not speak; when the other still
more increased his diffidence by changing from soliloquy to colloquy, in
a manner strangely mixed of familiarity and pathos.

"Ah, who is this? You did not hear me, my young friend, did you? Why,
you, too, look sad. My melancholy is not catching!"

"Sir, sir," stammered the other.

"Pray, now," with a sort of sociable sorrowfulness, slowly sliding along
the rail, "Pray, now, my young friend, what volume have you there? Give
me leave," gently drawing it from him. "Tacitus!" Then opening it at
random, read: "In general a black and shameful period lies before me."
"Dear young sir," touching his arm alarmedly, "don't read this book. It
is poison, moral poison. Even were there truth in Tacitus, such truth
would have the operation of falsity, and so still be poison, moral
poison. Too well I know this Tacitus. In my college-days he came near
souring me into cynicism. Yes, I began to turn down my collar, and go
about with a disdainfully joyless expression."

"Sir, sir, I--I--"

"Trust me. Now, young friend, perhaps you think that Tacitus, like me,
is only melancholy; but he's more--he's ugly. A vast difference, young
sir, between the melancholy view and the ugly. The one may show the
world still beautiful, not so the other. The one may be compatible with
benevolence, the other not. The one may deepen insight, the other
shallows it. Drop Tacitus. Phrenologically, my young friend, you would
seem to have a well-developed head, and large; but cribbed within the
ugly view, the Tacitus view, your large brain, like your large ox in the
contracted field, will but starve the more. And don't dream, as some of
you students may, that, by taking this same ugly view, the deeper
meanings of the deeper books will so alone become revealed to you. Drop
Tacitus. His subtlety is falsity, To him, in his double-refined anatomy
of human nature, is