tly to be defined. He seemed,
in short, to harmonise by their combination in himself all the various
qualities proper to a large and varied community of youths of nineteen
or twenty, to which, when actually present there, he was felt from hour
to hour to be indispensable. In fact school habits and standards had
survived in a world not so different from that of school for those who
are faithful to its type. When he looked back upon [226] it a little
later, college seemed to him, seemed indeed at the time, had he
ventured to admit it, a strange prolongation of boyhood, in its
provisional character, the narrow limitation of its duties and
responsibility, the very divisions of one's day, the routine of play
and work, its formal, perhaps pedantic rules. The veritable plunge
from youth into manhood came when one passed finally through those old
Gothic gates, from a somewhat dreamy or problematic preparation for it,
into the world of peremptory facts. A college, like a school, is not
made for one; and as Uthwart sat there, still but a scholar, still
reading with care the books prescribed for him by others--Greek and
Latin books--the contrast between his own position and that of the
majority of his coevals already at the business of life impressed
itself sometimes with an odd sense of unreality in the place around
him. Yet the schoolboy's sensitive awe for the great things of the
intellectual world had but matured itself, and was at its height here
amid this larger competition, which left him more than ever to find in
doing his best submissively the sole reward of so doing. He needs now
in fact less repression than encouragement not to be a "passman," as he
may if he likes, acquiescing in a lowly measure of culture which
certainly will not manufacture Miltons, nor turn serge into silk,
broom-blossom into verbenas, but only, perhaps not so faultily, leave
Emerald Uthwart and the like of him [227] essentially what they are.
"He holds his book in a peculiar way," notes in manuscript one of his
tutors; "holds on to it with both hands; clings as if from below, just
as his tough little mind clings to the sense of the Greek words he can
English so closely, precisely." Again, as at school, he had put his
neck under the yoke; though he has now also much reading quite at his
own choice; by preference, when he can come by such, about the place
where he finds himself, about the earlier youthful occupants, if it
might be, of his own