I could hardly write, I could not spell at all, and nobody
had ever pruned my budding fancies or shown me how to transfer thoughts
to language, as one is shown, or ought to be shown, when one learns the
Greek and Latin grammars and attacks Latin prose or Latin verse. My
teaching in this direction had been more than sketchy. The only
schoolroom matter in which I had made any advance was mathematics.
Euclid and algebra fascinated me. I felt for them exactly what I felt
for poetry. Though I did not know till many years afterwards that when
Pythagoras discovered the forty-seventh proposition he sacrificed a yoke
of oxen, not to Pallas Athene but to the Muses, I was instinctively
exactly of his opinion. I can remember to this day how I worked out the
proof of the forty-seventh proposition with Mr. Battersby, a young
Cambridge man who was curate to Mr. Philpott and who took us on in
mathematics. The realisation of the absolute, unalterable fact that in
every right-angled triangle the square of the side subtending it is
equal to the squares of the sides containing it, filled me with the kind
of joy and glory that one feels on reading for the first time Keats's
_Ode to a Nightingale_ or one of the great passages in Shakespeare.
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