In so far as any formal or systematic discipline of thought was concerned, I think I may say my education was a complete failure.  For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all.  The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never attained.  Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest of them, which is saying much; though I confess that my dilettantism was not wholly disreputable.  My mind excellently exhibited the Heraclitean doctrine:  a constant flux of information passed through it, but nothing remained.  Indeed, my senses were so continually crammed with new enchanting impressions, and every field of knowledge seemed so alluring, it was not strange I made little progress in any.

* * * * *

Perhaps it was unfortunate that both in America and in England I found myself in a college atmosphere of extraordinary pictorial charm.  The Arcadian loveliness of the Haverford campus and the comfortable simplicity of its routine; and then the hypnotizing beauty and curiosity and subtle flavour of Oxford life (with its long, footloose, rambling vacations)—­these were aptly devised for the exercise of the imagination, which is often a gracious phrase for loafing.  But these surroundings were too richly entertaining, and I was too green and soft and humorous (in the Shakespearean sense) to permit any rational continuous plan of study.  Like the young man to whom Coleridge addressed a poem of rebuke, I was abandoned, a greater part of the time, to “an Indolent and Causeless Melancholy”; or to its partner, an excessive and not always tasteful mirth.  I spent hours upon hours, with little profit, in libraries, flitting aimlessly from book to book.  With something between terror and hunger I contemplated the opposite sex.  In short, I was discreditable and harmless and unlovely as the young Yahoo can be.  It fills me with amazement to think that my preceptors must have seen, in that ill-conditioned creature, some shadow of human semblance, or how could they have been so uniformly kind?

Our education—­such of it as is of durable importance—­comes haphazard.  It is tinged by the enthusiasms of our teachers, gleaned by suggestions from our friends, prompted by glimpses and footnotes and margins.  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