ce it commanded, 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.