The university gave a great shock to that part of the American community with which Page had spent his life by beginning its first session in October, 1876, without an opening prayer.  Instead Thomas H. Huxley was invited from England to deliver a scientific address—­an address which now has an honoured place in his collected works.  The absence of prayer and the presence of so audacious a Darwinian as Huxley caused a tremendous excitement in the public prints, the religious press, and the evangelical pulpit.  In the minds of Gilman and his abettors, however, all this was intended to emphasize the fact that Johns Hopkins was a real university, in which the unbiased truth was to be the only aim.  And certainly this was the spirit of the institution.  “Gentlemen, you must light your own torch,” was the admonition of President Gilman, in his welcoming address to his twenty fellows; intellectual independence, freedom from the trammels of tradition, were thus to be the directing ideas.  One of Page’s associates was Josiah Royce, who afterward had a distinguished career in philosophy at Harvard.  “The beginnings of Johns Hopkins,” he afterward wrote, “was a dawn wherein it was bliss to be alive.  The air was full of noteworthy work done by the older men of the place and of hopes that one might find a way to get a little working power one’s self.  One longed to be a doer of the word, not a hearer only, a creator of his own infinitesimal fraction of the product, bound in God’s name to produce when the time came.”

A choice group of five aspiring Grecians, of whom Page was one, periodically gathered around a long pine table in a second-story room of an old dwelling house on Howard Street, with Professor Gildersleeve at the head.  The process of teaching was thus the intimate contact of mind with mind.  Here in the course of nearly two years’ residence, Page was led by Professor Gildersleeve into the closest communion with the great minds of the ancient world and gained that intimate knowledge of their written word which was the basis of his mental equipment.  “Professor Gildersleeve, splendid scholar that he is!” he wrote to a friend in North Carolina.  “He makes me grow wonderfully.  When I have a chance to enjoy AEschylus as I have now, I go to work on those immortal pieces with a pleasure that swallows up everything.”  To the extent that Gildersleeve opened up the literary treasures of the past—­and no man had a greater appreciation of his favourite authors than this fine humanist—­Page’s life was one of unalloyed delight.  But there was another side to the picture.  This little company of scholars was composed of men who aspired to no ordinary knowledge of Greek; they expected to devote their entire lives to the subject, to edit Greek texts, and to hold Greek chairs at the leading American universities.  Such, indeed, has been the career of nearly all members of the group.  The Greek tragedies were therefore read for other things than their stylistic and dramatic