There was a time, I think, when I hung in tender
equilibrium among various possibilities. I was enamoured of
mathematics and physics: I went far enough in the latter to be
appointed undergraduate assistant in the college laboratory. I had
learned, by my junior year, exploring the charms of integral
calculus, that there is no imaginable mental felicity more serenely
pure than suspended happy absorption in a mathematical problem. Of
course I attained no higher than the dregs of the subject; on that
grovelling level I would still (in Billy Sunday's violent trope)
have had to climb a tree to look a snake in the eye; but I could see
that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still
withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin. French, German, and Latin,
and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of
Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology and the tongues. I was a
member in decent standing of the college classical club, and visions
of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy. A
compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still
much to learn; and I had a delicious hallucination in which I saw
myself compiling a volume of commentaries on the various systems of
this queen of sciences. "The Grammar of Agnostics," I think it was
to be called: it would be written in a neat and comely hand on
thousands of pages of pure white foolscap: I saw myself adding to it
night by night, working _ohne Hast, ohne Rast_. And there were other
careers, too, as statesman, philanthropist, diplomat, that I
considered not beneath my horoscope. I spare myself the careful
delineation of these projects, though they would be amusing enough.

But beneath these preoccupations another influence was working its
inward way. My paramount interest had always been literary, though
regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter
concern. Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of
R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first
became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly
for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional
skill. I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe Hyne,
Anthony Hope, and other great loves of my earliest teens; those
authors' delicious mysteries and picaresques I took for granted, not
troubling over their method; but in Stevenson, even to a schoolboy
the conscious artifice and nicety of