ber this man,
preparing to be a building contractor, who loved Keats because he
made him laugh. I wonder if the critics have not too insistently
persuaded us to read our poet in a black-edged mood? After all, his
nickname was "Junkets."

* * * * *

So it was that I first, in any transcending sense, fell under the
empire of a poet. Here was an endless fountain of immortal drink:
here was a history potent to send a young mind from its bodily
tenement. The pleasure was too personal to be completely shared; for
the most part J---- and I read not together, but each by each, he
sitting in his morris chair by the desk, I sprawled upon his couch,
reading, very likely, different poems, but communicating, now and
then, a sudden discovery. Probably I exaggerate the subtlety of our
enjoyment, for it is hard to review the unself-scrutinizing moods of
freshmanhood. It would be hard, too, to say which enthusiast had the
greater enjoyment: he, because these glimpses through magic
casements made him merry; I, because they made me sad. Outside, the
snow sparkled in the pure winter night; the long lance windows of
the college library shone yellow-panelled through the darkness, and
there would be the occasional interruption of light-hearted
classmates. How perfectly it all chimed into the mood of St. Agnes'
Eve! The opening door would bring a gust of lively sound from down
the corridor, a swelling jingle of music, shouts from some humorous
"rough-house" (probably those sophomores on the floor below)--

The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone--
The hall-door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.

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