protectors, my refined and gentle stepmother.

As this record can, however, have no value that is not based on
its rigorous adhesion to the truth, I am bound to say that the
dreariness and sterility of my school-life were more apparent
than real. I was pursuing certain lines of moral and mental
development all the time, and since my schoolmasters and my
schoolfellows combined in thinking me so dull, I will display a
tardy touch of 'proper spirit' and ask whether it may not partly
have been because they were themselves so commonplace. I think
that if some drops of sympathy, that magic dew of Paradise, had
fallen upon my desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or,
at all events, like that chimerical flower, the Rose of Jericho.
As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual
drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth. They did not
destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient,
that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on
unseen. This took the form of dreams and speculations, in the
course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the
mind, the actual aims of which were futile, although the
movements themselves were useful. If I may more minutely define
my meaning, I would say that in my schooldays, without possessing
thoughts, I yet prepared my mind for thinking, and learned how to
think.

The great subject of my curiosity at this time was words, as
instruments of expression. I was incessant in adding to my
vocabulary, and in finding accurate and individual terms for
things. Here, too, the exercise preceded the employment, since I
was busy providing myself with words before I had any ideas to
express with them. When I read Shakespeare and came upon the
passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he had no thoughts
until his master taught him words, I remember starting with
amazement at the poet's intuition, for such a Caliban had I been:

I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like
A thing most brutish; I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them know.

For my Prosperos I sought vaguely in such books as I had access
to, and I was conscious that as the inevitable word seized hold
of me, with it out of the darkness into strong light came the
image and the idea.

My Father p