important event in English
history was the event that never happened at all (you yourself may
look up his explanation) so perhaps the college course that meant
most to me was the one I never attended. What it meant to those
sophomores of the class of 1909 is another gentle speculation. Three
years later, when I was a senior, and those sophomores had left
college, another youth and myself were idly prowling about a
dormitory corridor where some of those same sophomores had
previously lodged. An unsuspected cupboard appeared to us, and
rummaging in it we found a pile of books left there, forgotten, by a
member of that class. It was a Saturday afternoon, and my companion
and I had been wondering how we could raise enough cash to go to
town for dinner and a little harmless revel. To shove those books
into a suitcase and hasten to Philadelphia by trolley was the
obvious caper; and Leary's famous old bookstore ransomed the volumes
for enough money to provide an excellent dinner at Lauber's, where,
in those days, the thirty-cent bottle of sour claret was considered
the true, the blushful Hippocrene. But among the volumes was a copy
of Professor Page's anthology which had been used by one of J----'s
companions in that poetry course. This seemed to me too precious to
part with, so I retained it; still have it; and have occasionally
studied the former owner's marginal memoranda. At the head of The
Eve of St. Agnes he wrote: "Middle Ages. N. Italy. Guelph,
Guibilline." At the beginning of Endymion he recorded: "Keats tries
to be spiritualized by love for celestials." Against Sleep and
Poetry: "Desultory. Genius in the larval state." The Ode on a
Grecian Urn, he noted: "Crystallized philosophy of idealism.
Embalmed anticipation." The Ode on Melancholy: "Non-Gothic. Not of
intellect or disease. Emotions."

Darkling I listen to these faint echoes from a vanished lecture
room, and ponder. Did J---- keep his copy of the book, I wonder, and
did he annotate it with lively commentary of his own? He left
college at the end of our second year, and I have not seen or heard
from him these thirteen years. The last I knew--six years ago--he
was a contractor in an Ohio city; and (is this not significant?) in
a letter written then to another classmate, recalling some
waggishness of our own sophomore days, he used the phrase "Like Ruth
among the alien corn."

In so far as one may see turning points in a tangle of yarn, or
count dewdrops on a m