III

Two or three years previously an eccentric merchant named Johns Hopkins had died, leaving the larger part of his fortune to found a college or university in Baltimore.  Johns Hopkins was not an educated man himself and his conception of a new college did not extend beyond creating something in the nature of a Yale or Harvard in Maryland.  By a lucky chance, however, a Yale graduate who was then the President of the University of California, Daniel Coit Gilman, was invited to come to Baltimore and discuss with the trustees his availability for the headship of the new institution.  Dr. Gilman promptly informed his prospective employers that he would have no interest in associating himself with a new American college built upon the lines of those which then existed.  Such a foundation would merely be a duplication of work already well done elsewhere and therefore a waste of money and effort.  He proposed that this large endowment should be used, not for the erection of expensive architecture, but primarily for seeking out, in all parts of the world, the best professorial brains in certain approved branches of learning.  In the same spirit he suggested that a similarly selective process be adopted in the choice of students:  that only those American boys who had displayed exceptional promise should be admitted and that part of the university funds should be used to pay the expenses of twenty young men who, in undergraduate work at other colleges, stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries.  The bringing together of these two sets of brains for graduate study would constitute the new university.  A few rooms in the nearest dwelling house would suffice for headquarters.  Dr. Gilman’s scheme was approved; he became President on these terms; he gathered his faculty not only in the United States but in England, and he collected his first body of students, especially his first twenty fellows, with the same minute care.

It seems almost a miracle that an inexperienced youth in a little Methodist college in Virginia should have been chosen as one of these first twenty fellows, and it is a sufficient tribute to the impression that Page must have made upon all who met him that he should have won this great academic distinction.  He was only twenty-one at the time—­the youngest of a group nearly every member of which became distinguished in after life.  He won a Fellowship in Greek.  This in itself was a great good fortune; even greater was the fact that his new life brought him into immediate contact with a scholar of great genius and lovableness.  Someone has said that America has produced four scholars of the very first rank—­Agassiz in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard Gibbs in physics, and Gildersleeve in Greek.  It was the last of these who now took Walter Page in charge.  The atmosphere of Johns Hopkins was quite different from anything which the young man had previously known.