of two years before. Things
had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the
spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would
never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with
tremendous ears and a way of saying, "The earth swirls down through
the ominous moons of preconsidered generations!" that made them vaguely
wonder why it did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was
the utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him. They
told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley's, and
featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau
Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the
age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He
talked of Greenwich Village now instead of "noon-swirled moons," and
met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street
and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had
regaled their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to
the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better
there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two
years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four times, but on
Amory's suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach
trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin's toss whether
this genius was too big or too petty for them.

Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed
easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every
night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on
every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his
opinions took shape in a miniature satire called "In a Lecture-Room,"
which he persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.

"Good-morning, Fool...
Three times a week
You hold us helpless while you speak,
Teasing our thirsty souls with the
Sleek 'yeas' of your philosophy...
Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,
Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep...
You are a student, so they say;
You hammered out the other day
A syllabus, from what we know
Of some forgotten folio;
You'd sniffled through an era's must,
Filling your nostrils up with dust,
And then, arising from your knees,
Published, in one gigantic sneeze...