I had not
deserved it, I must decline the honour. But I sent them my MS. as a
proof that I did not do so because I felt myself incapable, and because I
wished to give them some evidence that they had not erred in regarding me
as a poet.

Very foolish and boyish, the reader may say, and yet I never regretted
it. The Faculty were not to blame for the system pursued, and they did
their utmost in every way for four years to make it easy and happy for
one of the laziest and most objectionable students whom they had ever
had. I have never been really able to decide whether I was right or
wrong. At liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, neither I nor the professors
would ever have discovered a flaw in my industry. At the closely
cramped, orthodox, hide-bound, mathematical Princeton, every weakness in
me seemed to be developed. Thirty years later I read in the _Nassau
Monthly_, which I had once edited, that if Boker and I and a few others
had become known in literature, we had done so _in spite of_ our
education there. I do not know who wrote it; whoever he was, I am much
obliged to him for a very comforting word. For, discipline apart, it was
literally "in spite of our education" that we learned anything worth
knowing at Princeton--as it then was.

* * * * *

From this point a new phase of life begins. Prominent in it and as its
moving power was the great kindness of my father. That I had graduated
at all under any conditions was gratifying, and so was the fact that it
was not in reality without the so-called Second Honour, despite my low
grade. And the pitiable condition of my health was considered. During
the last year I had taken lessons in dancing and fencing, which helped me
a little, and I looked as if I might become strong with a change of life.
So my father took my mother and me on a grand excursion. We went to
Stonington, New York, and Saratoga, where I attended a ball--my first--and
then on to Niagara. On the way we stopped at Auburn, where there was a
great State-prison, which I visited alone. There was among its
attractions a noted murderer under sentence of death. There were two or
three ladies and gentlemen who were shown by the warder with me over the
building. He expressed some apprehension as to showing us the murderer,
for he was a very desperate character. We entered a large room, and I
saw a really gentlemanly-looking man heavily ironed, who was reading a
newspaper. While the others convers