lasses did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were
inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr.
Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a
nervous person and made the mistake of assuming that I was as timid as I
was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment
was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized
was too much!

This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my
reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every
moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate
my money was going May would see me bankrupt.

I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske,
Helmholtz, Haeckel,--all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I
had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early
English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the
beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and
Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the
troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of
lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves.
This dimly took shape as a volume to be called _The Development of
English Ideals_, a sufficiently ambitious project.

Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ and
without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many
others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen
sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading
with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual
significance of America was let loose upon me.

Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I
sought to compass the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order
and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the
consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting
or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that
everything moved from the simple to the complex--how the bow-string
became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked
with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every
touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and
while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered
from pole to pole