for the old world and the old moods, but
I cannot imagine myself back into them. I would give anything to lock
my door at night, and take down my Euripides; if I get as far as the
shelf, my hand drops.

'I begin to see a meaning in this phase of my life. I have been
learning something about the latter end of the nineteenth century, its
civilisation, its possibilities, and the subject has a keen interest
for me. Is it new, then? you will ask. To tell you the truth, I knew
nothing whatever about it until I came and began to work in America. I
am in the mood for frankness, and I won't spare myself. All my
so-called study of modern life in former days was the merest
dilettantism, mere conceit and boyish pedantry. I travelled, and the
fact that wherever I went I took a small classical library with me was
symbolical of my state of mind. I saw everything through old-world
spectacles. Even in America I could not get rid of my pedantry, as you
will recognise clearly enough if you look back to the letters I wrote
you at that time. I came then with theories in my head of what American
civilisation must be, and everything that I saw I made fit in with my
preconceptions. This time I came with my mind a blank. I was ill, and
had not a theory left in me on any subject in the universe. For the
first time in my life I was suffering all that a man can suffer; when
the Atlantic roared about me, I scarcely cared whether it engulfed me
or not. Getting back my health, I began to see with new eyes, and have
since been looking my hardest. And I have still not a theory on any
subject in the universe.

'In fact, I believe that for me the day of theories has gone by. I note
phenomena, and muse about them, and not a few interest me extremely.
The interest is enough. I am not a practical man; I am not a
philosopher. I may, indeed, have a good deal of the poet's mind, but
the poet's faculty is denied to me. It only remains to me to study the
word in its relations to my personality, that I may henceforth avoid
the absurdities to which I have such a deplorable leaning.

'Do you know what I ought to have been?--a schoolmaster. That is to
say, if I wished to do any work of direct good to my fellows in the
world. I could have taught boys well, better than I shall ever do
anything else. I could not only have taught them--the 'gerund-grinding'
of Thomas Carlyle--but could have inspired them with love of learning,
at all events such as were capable of b