Page was still the Southern boy, with the strange notions about the North and Northern people which were the inheritance of many years’ misunderstandings.  He writes of one fellow student to whom he had taken a liking.  “He is that rare thing,” he says, “a Yankee Christian gentleman.”  He particularly dislikes one of his instructors, but, as he explains, he is “a native of Connecticut, and Connecticut, I suppose, is capable of producing any unholy human phenomenon.”  Speaking of a beautiful and well mannered Greek girl whom he had met, he says:  “The little creature might be taken for a Southern girl, but never for a Yankee.  She has an easy manner and even an air of gentility about her that doesn’t appear north of Mason and Dixon’s Line.  Indeed, however much the Southern race (I say race intentionally:  Yankeedom is the home of another race from us) however much the Southern race owes its strength to Anglo-Saxon blood, it owes its beauty and gracefulness to the Southern climate and culture.  Who says that we are not an improvement on the English?  An improvement in a happy combination of mental graces and Saxon force?” This sort of thing is especially entertaining in the youthful Page, for it is precisely against this kind of complacency that, as a mature man, he directed his choicest ridicule.  As an editor and writer his energies were devoted to reconciling North and South, and Johns Hopkins itself had much to do with opening his eyes.  Its young men and its professors were gathered from all parts of the country; a student, if his mind was awake, learned more than Greek and mathematics; he learned much about that far-flung nation known as the United States.

And Page did not confine his work exclusively to the curriculum.  He writes that he is regularly attending a German Sunday School, not, however, from religious motives, but from a desire to improve his colloquial German.  “Is this courting the Devil for knowledge?” he asks.  And all this time he was engaging in a delightful correspondence—­from which these quotations are taken—­with a young woman in North Carolina, his cousin.  About this time this cousin began spending her summers in the Page home at Cary; her great interest in books made the two young people good friends and companions.  It was she who first introduced Page to certain Southern writers, especially Timrod and Sidney Lanier, and, when Page left for Johns Hopkins, the two entered into a compact for a systematic reading and study of the English poets.  According to this plan, certain parts of Tennyson or Chaucer would be set aside for a particular week’s reading; then both would write the impressions gained and the criticisms which they assumed to make, and send the product to the other.  The plan was carried out more faithfully than is usually the case in such arrangements; a large number of Page’s letters survive and give a complete history of his mental progress.  There are lengthy disquisitions on Wordsworth, Browning,