found myself in a college atmosphere of extraordinary pictorial
charm. The Arcadian loveliness of the Haverford campus and the
comfortable simplicity of its routine; and then the hypnotizing
beauty and curiosity and subtle flavour of Oxford life (with its
long, footloose, rambling vacations)--these were aptly devised for
the exercise of the imagination, which is often a gracious phrase
for loafing. But these surroundings were too richly entertaining,
and I was too green and soft and humorous (in the Shakespearean
sense) to permit any rational continuous plan of study. Like the
young man to whom Coleridge addressed a poem of rebuke, I was
abandoned, a greater part of the time, to "an Indolent and Causeless
Melancholy"; or to its partner, an excessive and not always tasteful
mirth. I spent hours upon hours, with little profit, in libraries,
flitting aimlessly from book to book. With something between terror
and hunger I contemplated the opposite sex. In short, I was
discreditable and harmless and unlovely as the young Yahoo can be.
It fills me with amazement to think that my preceptors must have
seen, in that ill-conditioned creature, some shadow of human
semblance, or how could they have been so uniformly kind?

Our education--such of it as is of durable importance--comes
haphazard. It is tinged by the enthusiasms of our teachers, gleaned
by suggestions from our friends, prompted by glimpses and footnotes
and margins. There was a time, I think, when I hung in tender
equilibrium among various possibilities. I was enamoured of
mathematics and physics: I went far enough in the latter to be
appointed undergraduate assistant in the college laboratory. I had
learned, by my junior year, exploring the charms of integral
calculus, that there is no imaginable mental felicity more serenely
pure than suspended happy absorption in a mathematical problem. Of