Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/24

 in health, and after a concluding year at Hackley, he entered Harvard College in 1906.

He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard, and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at college, his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and contemplative than towards the active life. His brother, at this time, appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition; and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting, with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue," the mediæval ideals of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk, deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought and of action. He emerged from his shell, made many friends, and threw himself with great zest into the social life of his comrades. It is evident, however, that this did not mean any slackening in his literary interests. His work gives ample proof of real, if not of systematic, culture. He genuinely loves and has made his own many of the great things of the past. His translations from Dante and Ariosto, for example, show no less sympathy than accomplishment. Very characteristic is his selection of the Twenty-sixth Canto of the Inferno, in which the narrative of Ulysses brings with it a breath from the great romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy that before he graduated he took up with zeal and with distinction the study of Keltic literature—a corrective, perhaps, in its cooler tones, to the tropical motives with which his mind was stored. He was one of the editors of the Harvard Monthly, to which he made frequent contributions of verse. xx