and palm-tree promenades
White belfries burn in the blue tropic air.

And even when the tropics were finally left behind,
he carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour,
an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it was a fortunate chance
that took this lover of sunlight and space and splendor,
in his most receptive years, to regions where they superabound.
Perhaps, had he been confined to gloomier climates, he could not have written:

From a boy
I gloated on existence. Earth to me
Seemed all-sufficient, and my sojourn there
One trembling opportunity for joy.

But the same good fortune pursued him throughout. He seemed predestined
to environments of beauty. When, at fourteen, he left his Mexican home,
it was to go to the Hackley School at Tarrytown, N.Y., an institution
placed on a high hill overlooking that noblest of rivers, the Hudson,
and surrounded by a domain of its own, extending to many acres
of meadow and woodland. An attack of scarlet fever in his childhood
had left his health far from robust, and it was thought
that the altitude of Mexico City was too great for him.
He therefore spent one of his vacations among the hills of New Hampshire,
and was afterwards given a year out of school, with the family
of his former tutor, in Southern California--again a region
famed for its beauty. He returned much improved in health,
and after a concluding year at Hackley, he entered Harvard College in 1906.

He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard,
and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at college,
his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and contemplative
than towards the active life. His brother, at this time,
appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition;
and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting,
with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals
of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk,
deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume
than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle
of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought
and of action. He emerged from his shell, made many friends,
and threw himself with great zest into the social life of his comrades.
It is evident, however, that this did not mean any slackening
in