Meantime Thyrsis was reading Darrell’s books and pamphlets, and coming to realize what a mind was here being destroyed. For this man, it seemed to him, was master of the noblest prose utterance that had been heard in America since Emerson died. He went again to hear him speak, in another ill-lighted and stuffy hall before less than a hundred people; and the pain of this was more than he could bear. He went home that night with his friend, and labored with him with all the force of his being. “You stay here,” he declared, “and put yourself at the mercy of your enemies! You waste your faculties contending with them--even knowing about them is enough to destroy you. And all the while you might escape from them altogether--might do your real work, that the world knows nothing of. No one can hinder you. And when you have written the book of your soul, then your tormentors will be--they will be like the tormentors of Dante! Go away! Go away to Europe, where you can be free!” And so before long, he stood upon a steamer-pier and waved Henry Darrell and his wife farewell. And every now and then would come letters, telling of long, long agonies; for Darrell had to fight for those few rare days when ill health would permit him to think. So year by year he labored at what Thyrsis knew, if it was ever finished, would be America’s first world-poem; and in the meantime eminent statesmen and moralists who were alarmed at the progress of “Socialist agitation”, would continue to conjure up before the public mind the night-mare spectre of the once-respected clergyman, who had deserted his weeping wife and children, and run away with a rich woman to found a “free-love colony”! Section 14. A couple of days after the Darrells sailed, Thyrsis set out himself to find a home. On account of the new book, he would have to be near a library, and so he had selected a college-town not far from New York. He went there now, and put up for a week at a students’ boarding-house, while prosecuting his search. A strange experience it was to him, after the years of struggle and contact with the world, to come back to that academic atmosphere; to find men who were still peacefully counting up the “feminine endings” in Shakespeare’s verse, and writing elaborate theses upon the sources of the Spenserian legends. Upon his excursions into the country some of these young men would tramp with him--threshing out, student-fashion, the problems of the universe; and how staggering it was to meet a man who was about to receive a master’s degree in literature--and who regarded Arthur Hugh Clough as a “dangerous” poet, and Tennyson’s “Two Voices” as containing vital thought, and T. H. Green as the world’s leading philosopher! And this was the “education” that was dispensed at America’s most aristocratic university--for this many millions of dollars had been contributed, and scores of magnificent buildings erected!