The excellent Burble was a great shock to me.  It seemed clear from his answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to hammer home that idea the first book I got from the Institute happened to be an American edition of the collected works of Shelley, his gassy prose as well as his atmospheric verse.  I was soon ripe for blatant unbelief.  And at the Young Men’s Christian Association I presently made the acquaintance of Parload, who told me, under promises of the most sinister secrecy, that he was “a Socialist out and out.”  He lent me several copies of a periodical with the clamant title of The Clarion, which was just taking up a crusade against the accepted religion.  The adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new ideas, and I will confess I had the fever of that phase badly.  Doubt, I say, but it was not so much doubt—­which is a complex thing—­as startled emphatic denial.  “Have I believed this!” And I was also, you must remember, just beginning love-letters to Nettie.

We live now in these days, when the Great Change has been in most things accomplished, in a time when every one is being educated to a sort of intellectual gentleness, a gentleness that abates nothing from our vigor, and it is hard to understand the stifled and struggling manner in which my generation of common young men did its thinking.  To think at all about certain questions was an act of rebellion that set one oscillating between the furtive and the defiant.  People begin to find Shelley—­for all his melody—­noisy and ill conditioned now because his Anarchs have vanished, yet there was a time when novel thought had to go to that tune of breaking glass.  It becomes a little difficult to imagine the yeasty state of mind, the disposition to shout and say, “Yah!” at constituted authority, to sustain a persistent note of provocation such as we raw youngsters displayed.  I began to read with avidity such writing as Carlyle, Browning, and Heine have left for the perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to imitate.  My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and the cosmos in turgid and startling expressions.  No doubt they puzzled her extremely.

I retain the keenest sympathy and something inexplicably near to envy for my own departed youth, but I should find it difficult to maintain my case against any one who would condemn me altogether as having been a very silly, posturing, emotional hobbledehoy indeed and quite like my faded photograph.  And when I try to recall what exactly must have been the quality and tenor of my more sustained efforts to write memorably to my sweetheart, I confess I shiver. . .  Yet I wish they were not all destroyed.