years of vigorous living to overhaul those catchwords and fill them
with a meaning of my own. The two teachers who first gave me some
suspicion of what lies in the kingdom of poetry--who gave "so sweet
a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into
it"--are both dead. May I mention their names?--Francis B. Gummere
and Albert Elmer Hancock, both of Haverford College. I cannot thank
them as, now, I would like to. For I am (I think) approaching a
stage where I can somewhat understand and relish the things of which
they spoke. And I wonder afresh at the patience and charity of those
who go on lecturing, unabated in zest, to boys of whom one in ten
may perhaps, fifteen years later, begin to grasp their message.

In so far as any formal or systematic discipline of thought was
concerned, I think I may say my education was a complete failure.
For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to
blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all.
The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with
the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never
attained. Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a
diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest of them,
which is saying much; though I confess that my dilettantism was not
wholly disreputable. My mind excellently exhibited the Heraclitean
doctrine: a constant flux of information passed through it, but
nothing remained. Indeed, my senses were so continually crammed with
new enchanting impressions, and every field of knowledge seemed so
alluring, it was not strange I made little progress in any.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was unfortunate that both in America and in England I