the importance in which it clothed all who
shared in it....

The private school I attended in the company of other boys with whom I
was brought up was called Densmore Academy, a large, square building of a
then hideous modernity, built of smooth, orange-red bricks with threads
of black mortar between them. One reads of happy school days, yet I fail
to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in the yard, which was
covered with black cinders that cut you when you fell. I think of it as a
penitentiary, and the memory of the barred lower windows gives substance
to this impression.

I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my incarceration.
All of value, had its teachers known anything of youthful psychology, of
natural bent, could have been put into me in three. At least four
criminally wasted years, to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating
effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The
Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's boot which I
drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic revealing as it
unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous
distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and
counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be
learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the 7th General
So-and-so proceeded with his whole army--" where? What does it matter?
One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher of understanding,
were worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the hatred of Virgil!
"Paret" (a shiver), "begin at the one hundred and thirtieth line and
translate!" I can hear myself droning out in detestable English a
meaningless portion of that endless journey of the pious AEneas; can see
Gene Hollister, with heart-rending glances of despair, stumbling through
Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room with chalk-rubbed blackboards and
heavy odours of ink and stale lunch. And I graduated from Densmore
Academy, the best school in our city, in the 80's, without having been
taught even the rudiments of citizenship.

Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse, which bit by bit we painfully
dissected. We never glimpsed the living, growing thing, never experienced
the Spirit, the same spirit that was able magically to waft me from a
wintry Lyme Street to the South Seas, the energizing, electrifying Spirit
of true achievement, of life, of God himself. Little by little