midnight
But the Final Schools were a different matter . In the first days of his return to Oxford , in the October of his third year , while he was still making up his lecture list , and taking a general oversight of the work demanded from him , before plunging definitely into it , he was oppressed with a sense that the two years lying before him constituted a problem which would be harder to solve than any which had yet been set him . It seemed to him in a moment which was one of some slackness and reaction , that he had been growing too fast . He had been making friends besides in far too many camps , and the thought , half attractive , half repellent , of all those midnight discussions over smouldering fires , which Oxford was preparing for him , those fascinating moments of intellectual fence with minds as eager and as crude as his own , and of all the delightful dipping into the very latest literature , which such moments encouraged and involved , seemed to convey a sort of warning to the boy 's will that it was not equal to the situation . He was neither dull enough nor great enough for a striking Oxford success . How was he to prevent himself from attempting impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity ? He felt a dismal certainty that he should never be able to control the strayings of will and curiosity , now into this path , now into that ; and a still stronger and genuine certainty that it is not by such digression that a man gets up the Ethics or the Annals .