“A man, now, would have put up a stunning ten-million-dollar library, with his name in gilt letters on the front of it. He would put half of the money into the building and half of the remainder into rare books which no one would look at once a year. It would be a grand thing, no doubt, but how many people would it reach compared with those whom Miss Brewster’s little libraries will stimulate and help?
“Why, a library can change the future of a whole community! I tell you, Miss Brewster has found where to sow her seed so that it will bring forth a hundredfold.
“I wondered what I could do. I could throw away my money easily enough, endow another chair at Harvard, erect another statue to some one, build a hospital; but, after all, what was I to do, provided that I did anything?
“Well, one day—it was Thursday afternoon—Mather said, ‘Conro, let’s go into chapel and hear Brooks.’ So we went. I hadn’t been inside the place for months. My set, you know, didn’t go in for that sort of thing much.
“Somehow, something Brooks said that afternoon stirred me up all over again and set me to thinking. Mather and I didn’t say anything as we came out, but I knew he too was thinking.
“We started off on a walk, and after a while, as we tramped along down past old John Harvard’s statue and on past the gymnasium, he threw back his head and, clapping me on the shoulder, burst out, ‘I say, old fellow, that man is a brick!’
“We turned down Craigie Street and sauntered on. Presently John Fiske turned the corner and nodded in a jolly way over his glasses at us. ‘Did you know, Conro,’ asked Mather, after we had passed out of hearing, ‘that Fiske could read fifteen languages, and knew no end of history and everything else, and had made his mark, before he was as old as we are by some years?’
“I didn’t know it, but I hadn’t time to say so before I looked up and saw just in front of us the gray beard and brown eyes of the man whom I, for one, think to be the greatest poet America has ever had.
“I had just got hold of Lowell last winter. Those lines of his which Miss Brewster quoted to us had set me to looking him up, and I was amazed to see how little I had known of his power.
“Well, whether it was Miss Brewster, or Phillips Brooks, or these men, the two best writers of English on the continent, and the thought of what they had made their lives mean in the world of ideas, I don’t know, but suddenly it all came over me, the thought of earnest lives that stood for something, and my own confounded folly, and I broke out for the first time: ‘I say, Mather, if a fellow has been a deuced fool for the first twenty-two years of his life, what is he likely to be at the end of the next twenty-two?’