f this
kind? By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most advanced pupils
uncovered many new facts about the language and even found hitherto
unsuspected beauties; but Page's letters show that this sort of effort
was extremely uncongenial. He fulminates against the "grammarians" and
begins to think that perhaps, after all, a career of erudite scholarship
is not the ideal existence. "Learn to look on me as a Greek drudge," he
writes, "somewhere pounding into men and boys a faint hint of the beauty
of old Greekdom. That's most probably what I shall come to before many
years. I am sure that I have mistaken my lifework, if I consider Greek
my lifework. In truth at times I am tempted to throw the whole thing
away. . . . But without a home feeling in Greek literature no man can lay
claim to high culture." So he would keep at it for three or four years
and "then leave it as a man's work." Despite these despairing words Page
acquired a living knowledge of Greek that was one of his choicest
possessions through life. That he made a greater success than his
self-depreciation would imply is evident from the fact that his
Fellowship was renewed for the next year.

But the truth is that the world was tugging at Page more insistently
than the cloister. "Speaking grammatically," writes Prof. E.G. Sihler,
one of Page's fellow students of that time, in his "Confessions and
Convictions of a Classicist," "Page was interested in that one of the
main tenses which we call the Present." In his after life, amid all the
excitements of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend
it with Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him
even more than did the heroes of the ancient world. He went somewhat
into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club whose
membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the town; probably
his most congenial associations, however, came of the Saturday night
meetings of the fellows in Hopkins Hall, where, over pipes and steins of
beer, they passed in review all the questions of the day. 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,