Word: life
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...must bid good by to that glorious popularity which is going to carry you through the world so beautifully. In certain classes of society a man who declares his friend to display a lack of elegance in taste is knocked down and kicked; in the higher walks of life in which you move, he is voted an insufferable prig and is avoided by everybody but eccentric people who court the society of social outcasts...
This matter of theatricals, which you have suggested, is a very good example of what I mean. You find your friends interested in something that bores you. It would be unwise to tell them that they are fools, for, in the first place, at their period of life that is a foregone conclusion, and in the second place, two can play at that game. Neither would it be wise to retire to your own room in disgust, for man is a gregarious mammal, and you are a man. Nor yet ought you to look as gloomy as a funeral...
...fashioned people might call this a waste of time; and if your object in life were to become an old-fashioned person, I suppose that it would be so. But the better a man of the world knows life in the world, the better off he is, and the more he studies character that does not know that it is being studied, the better be knows life...
...across the Yard, to have some one to call to you or growl at you as you open the door, some one ready to laugh with you at your author's wit, or to swear with you at the blindness of a textbook, - all this certainly tends to make life sweet. The other day, when that worthy African continued for the space of five minutes to call down blessings from Heaven upon my head in return for my five-cent subscription to the missionary cause, could I, had there been no one present to share my laugh, have considered...
...like, too, after an evening spent in company with the fair sex, to compare notes before the glowing coals, and, while composing myself for sleep, to tell, or hear told, an incident or two as to what "he said" and "she did." And often the pleasantest memories of college life are these hours spent with gas turned down, - hours filled with words that can only pass between friends that have played and worked together, for only to such do we like to unbosom ourselves of plans for play and work in the future...