not spoken of the soul.--

My infant lips muttered the meaningless words while my poor little
brain and imagination tried to find some joy, some picture, some
tangible delight, some inspiration in the mournful, oppressive poem.
If I had then been assigned intelligible verses to copy, an
Elizabethan lyric, a song that sang because it had to, a bit of
imagery, my childish fancy would have been fired, and I should not
have had to wait till I was eighteen years old before I read a single
poem voluntarily. And I should not have detested _The Psalm of Life_
all the rest of my days--at least I don't think I should. Longfellow
when I was a child was a particularly prolific mine of memory gems,
running as high as three thousand quotations to the ton. I never had a
teacher who didn't know her Longfellow with an intimacy almost as
great as her ignorance of Keats, Shelley, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling,
Herbert, Campion, Coleridge, Burns and the rest of the kings who lived
before Agamemnon. Longfellow was a lovely soul, and, within his
limits, a very true poet. But I was fed on his platitudes. I was daily
informed that--

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight.--

Just as if I cared, at ten, whether they were or not. I was told in
tripping measures of the village chestnut tree, to the total exclusion
of the linden and ilex; and as for the land where the citrons bloom,
and golden oranges are in the gloom, and the long silences of laurel
rise--"Kennst du das Land?" Not I! The spreading chestnut tree alone
cast its oppressive shadow across my childish fancy.

Another memory gem that I remember with a lasting grudge was--

Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

This I knew was false, and to be forced glibly to chatter the words
before the class shamed and angered me. Had not a maiden aunt of mine,
after many trips to the library of the New England Genealogical
Society, traced back our line to William the Conqueror? Was there
another boy or girl in the school who had descended from William the
Conqueror? No, sir! Several of them had kind hearts, and doubtless
simple faith--whatever that was--but side of my Norman blood this
counted for nothing. It is a vastly superior thing to have Norman
blood, and as for coronets--well, it may be that the new age will wipe
them literally out in a surge of Democracy--some of us hope so--but to
the romantic hea