86 UNDER THE TREES. 



hardly any aspect of life which he did not see, no 

 question which he did not ask, and few which he 

 failed to answer with more or less of truth. He 

 walked through an untrodden world of sights and 

 sounds, and reproduced the vast circle of his life 

 in a literature to which men will look as long as 

 the world stands for models of sweetness, beauty, 

 and power. Greek literature holds its place, not 

 because scholars have combined to keep alive its 

 traditions and make familiarity with it the bond of 

 the fellowship of culture, but because it is the faith 

 ful reflection of the life of a race who faced the 

 world on all sides with masterly intelligence and 

 power. It is a liberal education to have traveled 

 from yEschylus, with his almost Asiatic splendor of 

 imagination, to Theocritus, under whose exquisite 

 touch the soft outlines of Sicilian life took on idyl 

 lic loveliness ! 



And then there were those unbroken winter 

 evenings, when one began really to know the great 

 modern masters of literature. What would one not 

 give to have them back again, with their undis 

 turbed hours ending only when the fire or the lamp 

 gave out ! Those were nights of royal fellowships, 

 of introduction into the noblest society the world 

 has ever known, and it is the recollection of this 

 companionship which gives those days under col 

 lege roofs a unique and perennial charm. Then 

 first the spirit of our own race was revealed to us 

 in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton ; then first we 



