the thing, and felt
as if I had written it. I knew all about it, "_e'l chi, e'l quale_"; I
was privy to its intricacy; I caught without instruction the
alternating beat in the second line, and savoured all the good words,
_gilded car_, _glowing axle_, _Star that bids the shepherd fold_.
_Allay_ ravished me, young as I was. I knew why he had called the
Atlantic stream _steep_, and remembered Homer's "[Greek: Stugos
hudatos aipa rheethra]." Good soul, our pedagogue suggested _deep_! I
remember to this hour the sinking of the heart with which I heard him.
But the flash passed and darkness again gathered about me, the normal
darkness of those hateful days. "Sabrina fair" lifted it; my sky
showed me an amber shaft. I am recording moments, the reader will
remember, the few gleams which visited me in youth. I was far from the
time when I could connect them, see that poetry was the vesture of
religion, the woven garment whereby we see God. Love had to teach me
that. I was not born until I loved.

My third happy memory is of a brief and idyllic attachment, very
fervent, very romantic, entirely my own, and as I remember it, now,
entirely beautiful. Nothing remains but the fragrance of it, and its
dream-like quality, the sense I have of straying with the beloved
through a fair country. Such things assure me that I was not wholly
dead during those crushing years of servitude.

But those are, as I say, gleams out of the dark. They comfort me with
the thought that the better part of me was not dead, but buried here
with the worse. They point also to the truth, as I take it to be, that
the lack of privacy is one of the most serious detriments of
public-school life. I don't say that privacy is good for all boys, or
that it is good for any unless they are provided with a pursuit. It is
true that many boys seek to be private that they may be vicious, and
that the having the opportunity for privacy leads to vice. But that is
nearly always the fault of the masters. Vice is due to the need for
mental or material excitement; it is a crude substitute for romance.
If a boy is debarred from good romance, because he doesn't feel it or
hasn't been taught to feel it, he will take to bad. It is nothing else
at all: he is bored. And remembering that a boy can only think of one
thing at a time, the single aim of the master should be to give every
boy in his charge some sane interest which he can pursue to the death,
as a terrier chases a smell, in