I went to Wilberforce with high ideals.  I wanted to help to build a great university.  I was willing to work night as well as day.  I taught Latin, Greek, English, and German.  I helped in the discipline, took part in the social life, begged to be allowed to lecture on sociology, and began to write books.  But I found myself against a stone wall.  Nothing stirred before my impatient pounding!  Or if it stirred, it soon slept again.

Of course, I was too impatient!  The snarl of years was not to be undone in days.  I set at solving the problem before I knew it.  Wilberforce was a colored church-school.  In it were mingled the problems of poorly-prepared pupils, an inadequately-equipped plant, the natural politics of bishoprics, and the provincial reactions of a country town loaded with traditions.  It was my first introduction to a Negro world, and I was at once marvelously inspired and deeply depressed.  I was inspired with the children,—­had I not rubbed against the children of the world and did I not find here the same eagerness, the same joy of life, the same brains as in New England, France, and Germany?  But, on the other hand, the ropes and myths and knots and hindrances; the thundering waves of the white world beyond beating us back; the scalding breakers of this inner world,—­its currents and back eddies—­its meanness and smallness—­its sorrow and tragedy—­its screaming farce!

In all this I was as one bound hand and foot.  Struggle, work, fight as I would, I seemed to get nowhere and accomplish nothing.  I had all the wild intolerance of youth, and no experience in human tangles.  For the first time in my life I realized that there were limits to my will to do.  The Day of Miracles was past, and a long, gray road of dogged work lay ahead.

I had, naturally, my triumphs here and there.  I defied the bishops in the matter of public extemporaneous prayer and they yielded.  I bearded the poor, hunted president in his den, and yet was re-elected to my position.  I was slowly winning a way, but quickly losing faith in the value of the way won.  Was this the place to begin my life work?  Was this the work which I was best fitted to do?  What business had I, anyhow, to teach Greek when I had studied men?  I grew sure that I had made a mistake.  So I determined to leave Wilberforce and try elsewhere.  Thus, the third period of my life began.

First, in 1896, I married—­a slip of a girl, beautifully dark-eyed and thorough and good as a German housewife.  Then I accepted a job to make a study of Negroes in Philadelphia for the University of Pennsylvania,—­one year at six hundred dollars.  How did I dare these two things?  I do not know.  Yet they spelled salvation.  To remain at Wilberforce without doing my ideals meant spiritual death.  Both my wife and I were homeless.  I dared a home and a temporary job.  But it was a different daring from the days of my first youth.  I was ready to admit that the best of men might fail.  I meant still to be captain of my soul, but I realized that even captains are not omnipotent in uncharted and angry seas.