It did not take very long for J---- to work through the fifty pages
of Keats reprinted in Professor Hidden Page's anthology; and then
he, a lone and laughing faun among that pack of stern sophomores--so
flewed, so sanded, out of the Spartan kind, crook-knee'd and
dewlapped like Thessalian bulls--sped away into thickets of Landor,
Tennyson, the Brownings. There I, an unprivileged and unsuspected
hanger-on, lost their trail, returning to my own affairs. For some
reason--I don't know just why--I never "took" that course in
Nineteenth Century Poets, in the classroom at any rate. But just as
Mr. Chesterton, in his glorious little book, "The Victorian Age in
Literature," asserts that the most important event in English
history was the event that never happened at all (you yourself may
look up his explanation) so perhaps the college course that meant
most to me was the one I never attended. What it meant to those
sophomores of the class of 1909 is another gentle speculation. Three
years later, when I was a senior, and those sophomores had left
college, another youth and myself were idly prowling about a
dormitory corridor where some of those same sophomores had
previously lodged. An unsuspected cupboard appeared to us, and
rummaging in it we found a pile of books left there, forgotten, by a
member of that class. It was a Saturday afternoon, and my companion
and I had been wondering how we could raise enough cash to go to
town for dinner and a little harmless revel. To shove those books
into a suitcase and hasten to Philadelphia by trolley was the
obvious caper; and Leary's famous old bookstore ransomed the volumes
for enough money to provide an excellent dinner at Lauber's, where,
in those days, the thirty-cent bottle of sour claret was considered
the true, the blushful Hippocrene. But among the volumes was a copy
of Professor Page's anthology which had been used by one of J----'s
companions in that poetry course. This seemed to me too precious to