Part 2. - I saw the well–selected library, consisting of several thousand volumes, the spacious lecture rooms, and students’ apartments. I often wonder whether students are at all aware ...

I saw the well–selected library, consisting of several thousand volumes, the spacious lecture rooms, and students’ apartments. I often wonder whether students are at all aware of the wistful longing, – the envy – with which those who are precluded from academical life, view the arrangements of colleges. No library in a private house conveys any idea of the power of devotion to study which is suggested by the sight of a student’s apartment in a college. The sight of the snug solitary room, the bookshelves, the single desk and arm–chair, the larum, and even the flower–pot or two in the window, and the portrait of some favourite philosophical worthy, – these things send a thrill of envy through the heart of the thoughtful politician, or man of business, or woman, who cannot command such facilities for study. I know that the fallacy of attributing too much to external arrangements enters here: that many study to as much advantage under difficulties as any academical member in his retirement: – I know too that the student shares the human weakness of finding evil in his lot, and supposing that he should be better in some other circumstances; – I know this by a revelation once made to me by a college student, for whose facilities I had been intensely thankful, – a revelation of his deep and incessant trouble because he was living to himself, selfishly studying, and obliged to wait four or five years before he could bestir himself for his race; – yet, in spite of all this knowledge that the common equality of pleasures and pains subsists here, I never see the interior of a college without longing to impress upon its inmates how envied and enviable they are. It is difficult to remember that the stillness of the cell is of no avail without the intentness of the mind, and that there is no efficacious solitude in the deepest retirement, if the spirit is roving abroad after schemes of pleasure or ambition, – or even of piety and benevolence, which are not the appointed duty of the time. But I have wandered from my new acquaintance in Kosciusko’s garden.

I was surprised to learn the extraordinary high average of health the place can boast of. The young men enter at the age of from fourteen to twenty, stay three or four years, and number about 300 at a time. The mortality in the seventeen years preceding my visit was only five. For eight years before the winter of 1834, there had been no death. Within a few months after, the superintendent’s wife, a servant, and a cadet died; and this was, of course, considered an extraordinary mortality. I rather wondered at this account, for the young men look anything but robust, and the use of tobacco among them is very free indeed. It is prohibited, but not the less indulged in on that account, – nor from the absence of evil example in their superintendents. My new acquaintance made very frank confessions on this subject. He told me that he believed the free use of tobacco had extensively and irreparably injured his health, and that he bitterly mourned his first indulgence in it.

“Do not you mean to leave it off?” said I.

“No.”

“Do you think you could not?”

“I could; but it would take three weeks to cure myself; and during that time I could do nothing; and I cannot afford that. I could not learn my lessons without it, and the loss of three weeks would injure all my prospects in life.”

“Hardly so fatally as the ruin of your health, I should think. Is your case a common one here?”

“Too common. But I assure you I do all I can to prevent the bad consequences of my own example, I warn my juniors as they come in, very seriously.”

“Do you find your warnings of much use?”

“I am afraid not much.”

“They have the usual fate of mere precept, I suppose?”

“Yes, I am afraid so.”

The manners of the cadets are excellent. They are allowed, under restrictions, to mix with the company at Mr. Cozens’, and thus to be frequently in ladies’ society. There is a book kept at the hotel, where every cadet must, at each visit, enter his name at length, and the duration of his stay.

The second time I was at West Point was during the camping–out season. The artillery drill in the morning was very noisy and grand to ladies who had never seen anything of the “pomp and circumstance of glorious war.” Then the cadets retired to their tents; and the ladies flitted about all the morning, making calls on each other. When we had discharged this first of a traveller’s duties, we sauntered to the cemetery. Never did I see such a spot to be buried in. The green hill projects into the river so that the monumental pillar erected by the cadets to the comrade who was killed by the bursting of a gun in 1817 is visible from two long reaches. One other accident had occurred a little while before: a cadet had been killed by a comrade in fencing. The tombs are few, and the inscriptions simple. Broad, spreading trees overshadow the long grass, and the whole is so hemmed in, so intensely quiet, that no sound is to be heard but the plash of oars from below, and the hum of insects around, except when the evening gun booms over the heights, or the summer storm reverberates among the mountains.

Such a storm I had witnessed the evening before from the piazza of the hotel. I stayed from the parade to watch it. As the thick veil of rain came down, the mountains seemed to retire, growing larger as they receded. As the darkness advanced, the scene became strangely compound. A friend sat with me in the piazza, talking, of the deepest subjects on which human thought can speculate. Behind us were the open windows of the hotel, where, by turning the head, we might see the dancing going on, – the gallant cadets and their pretty partners, while all the black servants of the house ranged their laughing faces in the rear. The music of the ball–room came to us mingling with the prolonged bursts of thunder: and other, and grander strains rose from the river, where two large steam–boats, with their lights, moved like constellations on the water, conveying a regiment from Pennsylvania which was visiting the soldiery of New York State. They sent up rockets into the murky sky, and poured new blasts of music from their band as they passed our promontory. Every moment the lightning burst; now illuminating the interior of a mass of clouds; now quivering from end to end of heaven; now shedding broad livid gleams which suddenly revealed a solitary figure on the terrace, a sloop on the waters, and every jutting point of rock. Still the dance went on till the hour struck which abruptly called the youths away from their partners, and bade them hie to their tents.

On returning from the cemetery, we found Mr. and Mrs. Kemble, from the opposite side of the river, waiting to offer us their hospitality; and we agreed to visit them in the afternoon. Mt. Kemble’s boat awaited us at the landing–place by three o’clock, and we rowed about some time before landing on the opposite bank, so irresistible is the temptation to linger in this scene of magical beauty. The catholic chapel of Coldspring is well placed on a point above the river; and the village, hidden from West Point by a headland, is pretty. From Mr. Kemble’s we were to be treated with a visit to the Indian Fall, and were carried within half a mile of it by water. We followed the brawling brook for that distance, when we saw the glistening of the column of water through the trees. No fall can be prettier for its size, which is just small enough to tempt one to climb. A gentleman of our party made the attempt; but the rocks were too slippery with wet weed, and he narrowly escaped a tumble of twenty feet into the dark pool below. The boys, after bringing us branches of the black cherry, clustered with the fruit, found a safe and dry way up, and appeared waving their green boughs in triumph at the top of the rocks. The tide had risen so that the river was brimming full as we returned, and soft with the mountain shadows: but we landed at West Point in time to see the sun set, – twice, as it happened. At the landing–place we stood to see it drop behind the mountain; but just after we had bidden it good night, I saw that a meditative cadet, lying at length upon a rock, was still basking in the golden light, and I ran up the steep to the piazza. There, in a gap between two summits, was the broad disk, as round as ever; and once more we saw it sink in a tranquillity almost as grand as the stormy splendour of the preceding night. – Then ensued the evening parade; guitar music in the hotel: and dancing in the camp.