He neither analyzed nor attempted an expression of what he felt, but his first night within the walls was restless because of the inspiration which filled him.
Yet this college does not fail to make an appeal also to the thinking mind, only it is a strange appeal, tending to sadness.

The sudden silence after the tumult of the streets has come for some minds to be the symbol of a divorce between the knowledge within and the life without.

And this is not the separation which must always exist between thought and action, the gulf fixed between the student and the merchant.
It is a real divorce between the nation and the University, between the two kinds of life which ought, like man and woman, to complete each other through their very diversity, but here have gone hopelessly apart.
Never once through all the centuries of Ireland's struggle to express herself has the University felt the throb of her life.

It is true that Ireland's greatest patriots, from Swift to Davis, have been her children; but she has never understood their spirit, never looked on them as anything but strangers to her family.

They have been to her stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood.