CHAPTER FIVE 



W" 



COLLEGE LIFE— UPPERCLASS YEARS 



HEN college reopened in September 1875, the easy-going ways 

 )f that time permitted me to rejoin my class as a Junior. To be 

 sure, I was supposed to make up for the time I had lost by a series of 

 special examinations, but, as a matter of fact, I never took but one of 

 these. My whole future was dependent upon my reinstatement in my 

 class and had I known that, I should have been more punctilious about 

 "making up" my work. 



In Junior year we had, for the first time, considerable freedom in the 

 choice of studies and, as the courses were of only two hours a week each, 

 we had to take at least seven, instead of four or five as at present. The 

 complete change of atmosphere from the earlier years was most accept- 

 able and I seemed to be entering new and more spacious worlds, when 

 I took up physics with Dr. Brackett, psychology with Dr. McCosh, 

 logic with Dr. Atwater and, above all, English literature with Dr. 

 Murray. This latter course was a delightful revelation to me; I had, it 

 is true, done a lot of unsystematic reading and knew a considerable 

 amount of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and the great noveHsts, but 

 I had no conception of English literature as a whole. The systematic 

 survey of the whole field, the growth and development of literature 

 since Anglo-Saxon times, its connection with history, its sources and 

 relations to other literatures, were so novel and so charming, that I 

 have never forgotten the course, or ceased to be grateful to Dr. Murray 

 for it. I also kept up some Latin, French and German. Dr. Guyot's 

 course in geology, which was to be so pregnant with fate for Osborn and 

 myself, did not begin till the second term. I took no part in the games, 

 except the informal football previously described, but did a lot of work 

 in Whig Hall, which I attended with the utmost regularity. 



It was a great experience to be brought into contact with Dr. McCosh. 

 That he was a great man, we all recognized and felt and, while we ad- 

 mired him and were desperately afraid of him, we made fun of his 



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