The College was set on a hill top, overlooking a broad fair valley.
There was none of the rugged grandeur of our Tennessee Mountains, it was
a softer landscape than my home country offered. But the greatest
difference lay in the close packed, well tilled fields. Here and there
were patches of woods, but no forest. It was an agricultural country.
If I should set out to construct a heaven, I would build it on the lines
of that old campus. Whenever nowadays I am utterly tired and long for
rest, the vision comes to me of those ivy grown buildings and the rows
of scrawny poplars. It is my symbol for light-hearted joy and
contentment. The doleful shadow of my home did not reach so far, and I
was more carefree there than I have ever been elsewhere.
I joined heartily in the student life, played a fair game of football
and excelled in the new game of tennis. There is a period at the end of
adolescence when if ever, you feel an exuberance of animal well-being,
when it is a pride to be able to lift a heavier weight than your
neighbor, when it is a joy to feel your muscles ache with fatigue, when
your whole being is opening up to a new sensation for which you know no
name. I remember glorious tramps in the deep winter snow, as I look back
on them I know that the thrilling zest, which then seemed to me
intimately connected with the muscles of my thighs and back, was the
dawning realization of the sheer beauty of the world. I spent this
period at college. I suppose that is why I love the place.
From the first only one subject of study interested me. It was not on
the freshman year’s curriculum. By some twist of fate "Anglo-Saxon"
appealed to me vividly. I suppose it was an outgrowth from my boyish
fondness for Malory’s "Morte d’Arthur." In the library I found many
books in the crabbed Old English of the earliest chronicles. They still
seem to me the most fascinating which have ever been written. I
deciphered some of them with ease. Before I could get the meat out of
the others I had to master a grammar of Anglo-Saxon. All my spare
moments were spent among the shelves. My classroom work was poorly
done. But among the books I came into close contact with Professor
Meer, the librarian and head of the English Literature Department. His
specialty was Chaucer, but my interest ran back to an even earlier date.
He was my second adult friend and many an evening I spent in his home.
But our talk was always of literature rather than of life, of the very
early days, when there were no traditions nor conventions and each
writer was also a discoverer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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