The freshman lights his meerschaum (holding it in a silk handkerchief), and begins to make a plan for three or four years. But he never completes it. He believes Oxford to be as a fine sculptor, and wishes to put himself in its hands in such a way as to be best shapen by the experience, in a “wise passiveness.” He wants to be a scholar, and fears to be a pedant. He wants to learn a wise and graceful habit with his fellow-men, and fears to be what he hears called a gentleman. He wants to test his enthusiasm and prejudices, and fears to be a Philistine. He wants to taste pleasure delicately, and fears to be a _viveur_ or an æsthete. None of these aims is altogether conscious or precise; yet it is some such combination that he sees before him, faint and possible, at the end of three or four years. Nor has he any aim beyond that. He will work, but at what? Neither has he realised that he will be alone and unhelped. At first the loneliness is a great, and even at times a delirious, pleasure; and whether he is in a church, or in the fields, or among books, it is almost sensual, and never critical. Oxford is, as it were, doing his living for him. He is as powerless to influence the passage of his days as to plan the architecture of his dreams. He only awakens at his meals with contemporaries, and sometimes at interviews with tutors. The former find him dull and superior. The latter tell him that in his work he is indeed gathering honey, but filling no combs; and find him ungainly and vague. He consoles himself with the reflection that he is not becoming a pedant or a careless liver. He writes verses to celebrate the melodious days he lives. All influences of men fall idly upon him-- They on us were rolled But kept us not awake.