But when it came to mathematics I was no less
than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me,
before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me
after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special
student at the Keeley Heights High School.
The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In
English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It
was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with
his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying
attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a
trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising
the world.
I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I
quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was
to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I
pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced,
modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had
altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged
behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who
really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while
convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great
books as I did.
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