"sweet
teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
AEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.

II

ONE March evening in my Sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room
after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and
little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of
old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through
made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down,
the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it.
Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star
hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved upon
the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new
heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to
shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and the
dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place
about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the