ly have had for its ground some
timely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot or
revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. Wasn't I
myself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly,
even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate
watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint
and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his
contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no
grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all
that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he
was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:
just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive an
impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go
without many things, ever so many--as all persons do in whom
contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the
years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the
streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a
while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to
enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and
dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. What
it at all appreciably gave him--that is gave him in producible
form--would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now
thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has
come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence
that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other
hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however
small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. Strange
indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that _have_ stirred a
subjective passion--stirred it, I mean, in young persons predisposed to
a more or less fine inspired application.

III

But I positively dawdle and gape here--I catch myself in the act; so
that I take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that
mystification of the summer school, which I referred to a little way
back, at the time when the Summer School as known in America to-day was
so deep in the bosom of the future. The seat of acquisition I speak of
must have been contiguous to the house we occupied--I