passed and darkness again gathered about me, the normal darkness of
those hateful days. "Sabrina fair" lifted it; my sky showed me an
amber shaft. I am recording moments, the reader will remember, the few
gleams which visited me in youth. I was far from the time when I could
connect them, see that poetry was the vesture of religion, the woven
garment whereby we see God. Love had to teach me that. I was not born
until I loved.

My third happy memory is of a brief and idyllic attachment, very
fervent, very romantic, entirely my own, and as I remember it, now,
entirely beautiful. Nothing remains but the fragrance of it, and its
dream-like quality, the sense I have of straying with the beloved
through a fair country. Such things assure me that I was not wholly
dead during those crushing years of servitude.

But those are, as I say, gleams out of the dark. They comfort me with
the thought that the better part of me was not dead, but buried here
with the worse. They point also to the truth, as I take it to be, that
the lack of privacy is one of the most serious detriments of
public-school life. I don't say that privacy is good for all boys, or
that it is good for any unless they are provided with a pursuit. It is
true that many boys seek to be private that they may be vicious, and
that the having the opportunity for privacy leads to vice. But that is
nearly always the fault of the masters. Vice is due to the need for
mental or material excitement; it is a crude substitute for romance.
If a boy is debarred from good romance, because he doesn't feel it or
hasn't been taught to feel it, he will take to bad. It is nothing else
at all: he is bored. And remembering that a boy can only think of one
thing at a time, the single aim of the master should be to give every
boy in his charge some sane interest which he can pursue to the death,