Curiously uninfluenced by my surroundings, I in my turn failed to exercise influence, and my practical isolation was no less than it had been before.  It was thus that it came about that my social memories of my boarding-school life are monotonous and vague.  It was a period during which, as it appears to me now on looking back, the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow pool which was almost stagnant.  I was labouring to gain those elements of conventional knowledge, which had, in many cases, up to that time been singularly lacking.  But my brain was starved, and my intellectual perceptions were veiled.  Elder persons who in later years would speak to me frankly of my school-days assured me that, while I had often struck them as a smart and quaint and even interesting child, all promise seemed to fade out of me as a schoolboy, and that those who were most inclined to be indulgent gave up the hope that I should prove a man in a way remarkable.  This was particularly the case with the most indulgent of my protectors, my refined and gentle stepmother.

As this record can, however, have no value that is not based on its rigorous adhesion to the truth, I am bound to say that the dreariness and sterility of my school-life were more apparent than real.  I was pursuing certain lines of moral and mental development all the time, and since my schoolmasters and my schoolfellows combined in thinking me so dull, I will display a tardy touch of ‘proper spirit’ and ask whether it may not partly have been because they were themselves so commonplace.  I think that if some drops of sympathy, that magic dew of Paradise, had fallen upon my desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or, at all events, like that chimerical flower, the Rose of Jericho.  As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth.  They did not destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient, that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on unseen.  This took the form of dreams and speculations, in the course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the mind, the actual aims of which were futile, although the movements themselves were useful.  If I may more minutely define my meaning, I would say that in my schooldays, without possessing thoughts, I yet prepared my mind for thinking, and learned how to think.

The great subject of my curiosity at this time was words, as instruments of expression.  I was incessant in adding to my vocabulary, and in finding accurate and individual terms for things.  Here, too, the exercise preceded the employment, since I was busy providing myself with words before I had any ideas to express with them.  When I read Shakespeare and came upon the passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he had no thoughts until his master taught him words, I remember starting with amazement at the poet’s intuition, for such a Caliban had I been: