subject; on that grovelling level I would still (in Billy Sunday’s violent trope) have had to climb a tree to look a snake in the eye; but I could see that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin.  French, German, and Latin, and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology and the tongues.  I was a member in decent standing of the college classical club, and visions of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy.  A compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still much to learn; and I had a delicious hallucination in which I saw myself compiling a volume of commentaries on the various systems of this queen of sciences.  “The Grammar of Agnostics,” I think it was to be called:  it would be written in a neat and comely hand on thousands of pages of pure white foolscap:  I saw myself adding to it night by night, working ohne Hast, ohne Rast.  And there were other careers, too, as statesman, philanthropist, diplomat, that I considered not beneath my horoscope.  I spare myself the careful delineation of these projects, though they would be amusing enough.

But beneath these preoccupations another influence was working its inward way.  My paramount interest had always been literary, though regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter concern.  Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional skill.  I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe Hyne, Anthony Hope, and other great loves of my earliest teens; those authors’ delicious mysteries and picaresques I took for granted, not troubling over their method; but in Stevenson, even to a schoolboy the conscious artifice and nicety of phrase were puzzingly apparent.  A taste for literature, however, is a very different thing from a determination to undertake the art in person as a means of livelihood.  It takes brisk stimulus and powerful internal fevers to reduce a healthy youth to such a contemplation.  All this is a long story, and I telescope it rigorously, thus setting the whole matter, perhaps, in a false proportion.  But the central and operative factor is now at hand.

* * * * *

There was a certain classmate of mine (from Chicago) whose main devotion was to scientific and engineering studies.  But since his plan embraced only two years at college before “going to work,” he was (in the fashion traditionally ascribed to Chicago) speeding up the cultural knick-knacks of his education.  So, in our freshman year, he was attending a course on “English Poets of the Nineteenth Century,” which was, in the regular schedule of things, reserved for sophomores (supposedly riper for matters of feeling).