In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships. The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the scholar and the gentleman. The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars. With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America. He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated “Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too. And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world of poetry.