ellows, 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.
The university gave a great shock to that part of the American community
with which Page had spent his life by beginning its first session in
October, 1876, without an opening prayer. Instead Thomas H. Huxley was
invited from England to deliver a scientific address--an address which
now has an honoured place in his collected works. The absence of prayer
and the presence of so audacious a Darwinian as Huxley caused a
tremendous excitement in the public prints, the religious press, and the
evangelical pulpit. In the minds of Gilman and his abettors, however,
all this was intended to emphasize the fact that Johns Hopkins was a
real university, in which the unbiased truth was to be the only aim. And
certainly this was the spirit of the institution. "Gentlemen, you must
light your own torch," was the admonition of President Gilman, in his
welcoming address to his twenty fellows; intellectual independence,
freedom from the trammels of tradition, were thus to be the directing
ideas. One of Page's associates was Josiah Royce, who afterward had a
distinguished career in philosophy at Harvard. "The beginnings of Johns
Hopkins," he afterward wrote, "was a dawn wherein it was bliss to be
alive. The air was full of noteworthy work done by the older men of the
place and of hopes that one might find a way to get a little working
power one's self. One longed to be a doer of the word, not a hearer
only, a creator of his own infinitesim