Now I was living in a remote dormitory on the outskirts of the wide campus (that other Eden, demi-paradise, that happy breed of men, that little world!) some distance from the lecture halls and busy heart of college doings.  It was the custom of those quartered in this colonial and sequestered outpost to make the room of some central classmate a base for the day, where books might be left between lectures, and so on.  With the Chicagoan, whom we will call “J——­,” I had struck up a mild friendship; mostly charitable on his part, I think, as he was from the beginning one of the most popular and influential men in the class, whereas I was one of the rabble.  So it was, at any rate; and often in the evening, returning from library or dining hall on the way to my distant Boeotia, I would drop in at his room, in a lofty corner of old Barclay Hall, to pick up note-books or anything else I might have left there.

What a pleasant place is a college dormitory at night!  The rooms with their green-hooded lights and boyish similarity of decoration, the amiable buzz and stir of a game of cards under festoons of tobacco smoke, the wiry tinkle of a mandolin distantly heard, sudden clatter subsiding again into a general humming quiet, the happy sense of solitude in multitude, these are the partial ingredients of that feeling no alumnus ever forgets.  In his pensive citadel, my friend J——­ would be sitting, with his pipe (one of those new “class pipes” with inlaid silver numerals, which appear among every college generation toward Christmas time of freshman year).  In his lap would be the large green volume ("British Poets of the Nineteenth Century,” edited by Professor Curtis Hidden Page) which was the textbook of that sophomore course.  He was reading Keats.  And his eyes were those of one who has seen a new planet swim into his ken.  I don’t know how many evenings we spent there together.  Probably only a few.  I don’t recall just how we communed, or imparted to one another our juvenile speculations.  But I plainly remember how he would sit beside his desk-lamp and chuckle over the Ode to a Nightingale.  He was a quizzical and quickly humorous creature, and Keats’s beauties seemed to fill him not with melancholy or anguish, but with a delighted prostration of laughter.  The “wormy circumstance” of the Pot of Basil, the Indian Maid nursing her luxurious sorrow, the congealing Beads-man and the palsied beldame Angela—­these and a thousand quaintnesses of phrase moved him to a gush of glorious mirth.  It was not that he did not appreciate the poet, but the unearthly strangeness of it all, the delicate contradiction of laws and behaviours known to freshmen, tickled his keen wits and emotions until they brimmed into puzzled laughter.  “Away!  Away!” he would cry—­

                For I will fly to thee,
          Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
          But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
          Though the dull brain perplexes and retards—­