y 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
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.