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--

and he would shout with merriment. Beaded bubbles winking at the
brim; Throbbing throats' long, long melodious moan; Curious
conscience burrowing like a mole; Emprison her soft hand and let her
rave; Men slugs and human serpentry; Bade her steep her hair in
weird syrops; Poor weak palsy-stricken churchyard thing; Shut her
pure sorrow-drops with glad exclaim--such lines were to him a
constant and exhilarating excitement. In the very simplicity and
unsophistication of his approach to the poet was a virgin naivete of
discernment that an Edinburgh Reviewer would rarely attain. Here, he
dimly felt, was the great key

To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,
... aye, to all the mazy world
Of silvery enchantment.

And in line after line of Endymion, as we pored over them together,
he found the clear happiness of a magic that dissolved everything
into lightness and freedom. It is agreeable to remem