The Professor’s inspiring influence upon his students, however, is not confined to his courses. He has formed a little literary society in the college, which meets weekly to discuss with him the larger cultural issues of the time. Lately he has become interested in philosophy. “In my day,” he once told me, “we young literary men did not study philosophy.” But now, professor that he is, he goes to sit at the feet of the great metaphysicians of his college. He has been immensely stirred by the social and moral awakening of recent years. He willingly allows discussions of socialism in his little society, but is inclined to deprecate the fanaticism of college men who lose their sense of proportion on social questions. But in his open-mindedness to radical thought he is an inspiration to all who meet him. To be radical, he tells his boys, is a necessary part of experience. In professorial circles he is looked upon as a veritable revolutionist, for he encourages the discussion of vital questions even in the classroom. Questions such as evolution, capital punishment, free thought, protection and education of women, furnish the themes for composition. And from the essays of the masters--Macaulay, Huxley, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold--come the great arguments as freshly and as vitally as of yore. Literature, says the Professor, is not merely language; it is ideas. We must above all, he says, teach our undergraduates to think. Although the Professor is thus responsive to the best radicalisms of the day, he does not let their shock break the sacred chalice of the past. He is deeply interested in the religious life of his college. A devout Episcopalian, he deplores the callousness of the present generation towards the immemorial beauty of ritual and dogma. The empty seats of the college chapel fill him with dismay. One of his most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes from a quiet hour within its dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past him, unmindful of the eternal things. I think I like the Professor best in his study at home, when he talks on art and life with one or two respectful students. On the wall is a framed autograph of Wordsworth, picked up in some London bookshop; and a framed letter of appreciation from Richard Watson Gilder. On the table stands a richly-bound volume of “Ganymede” with some of the very manuscripts, as he has shown us, bound in among the leaves. His deep and measured voice flows pleasantly on in anecdotes of the Authors’ Club, or reminiscences of the golden past. As one listens, the glamor steals upon one. This is the literary life, grave, respected, serene. All else is hectic rush, modern ideas a futile babel. It is men like the Professor who keep the luster of scholarship bright, who hold true the life of the scholar and the gentleman as it was lived of old. In a world of change he keeps the faith pure.