values.  The sons of Germania then exercised a profound influence on American education; Professor Gildersleeve himself was a graduate of Goettingen, and the necessity of “settling hoti’s business” was strong in his seminar.  Gildersleeve was a writer of English who developed real style; as a Greek scholar, his fame rests chiefly upon his work in the field of historical syntax.  He assumed that his students could read Greek as easily as they could read French, and the really important tasks he set them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology.  For work of this kind Page had little interest and less inclination.  When Professor Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb [Greek:  prin], and direct him to study the peculiarities of its use from Homer down to the Byzantine writers, he really found himself in pretty deep waters.  Was it conceivable that a man could spend a lifetime in an occupation of this kind?  By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most advanced pupils uncovered many new facts about the language and even found hitherto unsuspected beauties; but Page’s letters show that this sort of effort was extremely uncongenial.  He fulminates against the “grammarians” and begins to think that perhaps, after all, a career of erudite scholarship is not the ideal existence.  “Learn to look on me as a Greek drudge,” he writes, “somewhere pounding into men and boys a faint hint of the beauty of old Greekdom.  That’s most probably what I shall come to before many years.  I am sure that I have mistaken my lifework, if I consider Greek my lifework.  In truth at times I am tempted to throw the whole thing away. . . .  But without a home feeling in Greek literature no man can lay claim to high culture.”  So he would keep at it for three or four years and “then leave it as a man’s work.”  Despite these despairing words Page acquired a living knowledge of Greek that was one of his choicest possessions through life.  That he made a greater success than his self-depreciation would imply is evident from the fact that his Fellowship was renewed for the next year.

But the truth is that the world was tugging at Page more insistently than the cloister.  “Speaking grammatically,” writes Prof.  E.G.  Sihler, one of Page’s fellow students of that time, in his “Confessions and Convictions of a Classicist,” “Page was interested in that one of the main tenses which we call the Present.”  In his after life, amid all the excitements of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend it with Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him even more than did the heroes of the ancient world.  He went somewhat into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club whose membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the town; probably his most congenial associations, however, came of the Saturday night meetings of the fellows in Hopkins Hall, where, over pipes and steins of beer, they passed in review all the questions of the day.