Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the
vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do
in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....
Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out
of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's
_Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by
Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with
visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests,
little towns on river-bends.
A tramp or sailor--which?
First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and
back again?
Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my
favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett
and Fielding?
It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming,
to screw myself up to the right pitch.
Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the
English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New
York waterfront that same afternoon....
I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to
go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home
again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.
Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Caesar and
Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley.
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