es while she beckons.

Hyacinth Conneally had submitted himself to such emotions time after
time when, fresh from the wilds of Connemara, he made his way to the
examination-hall, an outside student in a borrowed cap and gown. Now,
when for the first time he entered into the actual life of the college,
could look up at windows of rooms that were his own, and reckon on his
privilege of fingering tomes from the shelves of the huge library, the
spirit of the place awed him anew. He neither analyzed nor attempted
an expression of what he felt, but his first night within the walls was
restless because of the inspiration which filled him.

Yet this college does not fail to make an appeal also to the thinking
mind, only it is a strange appeal, tending to sadness. The sudden
silence after the tumult of the streets has come for some minds to
be the symbol of a divorce between the knowledge within and the life
without. And this is not the separation which must always exist between
thought and action, the gulf fixed between the student and the merchant.
It is a real divorce between the nation and the University, between
the two kinds of life which ought, like man and woman, to complete each
other through their very diversity, but here have gone hopelessly apart.
Never once through all the centuries of Ireland's struggle to express
herself has the University felt the throb of her life. It is true
that Ireland's greatest patriots, from Swift to Davis, have been her
children; but she has never understood their spirit, never looked on
them as anything but strangers to her family. They have been to her
stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they
have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood. It is very wonderful that
the University alone has been able to resist the glamour of Ireland's
past, and has failed to admire the persistency of her nationality.
There has surely been enough in every century that has passed since the
college was founded to win it over from alien thought and the ideals of
the foreigner.

All this Hyacinth came to feel afterwards, and learnt in bitterness of
spirit to be angry at the University's isolation from Irish life. At
first quite other thoughts crowded upon his mind. He felt a rebellion
against his father's estimate of what he was to learn. It seemed to him
that he had come into vital touch with the greatest life of all. He was
to join the ranks of those who besieged the ears of