Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/49

 mother's shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never remitting his fierceness, till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow—the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel, when the noblest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scæan gate.

Heroic days were these, but the dark ages of school-boy life came closing over them. I suppose it's all right in the end, yet, by Jove, at first sight, it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your mother's dressing-room to a buzzing school. You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space; you vex the electric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the men who have saved whole Empires from oblivion. What more will you ever learn? Yet the dismal change is ordained, and then, thin, meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish doggerel grammars, and graduses, Dictionaries, and Lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages, are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three inch scrap of "Scriptores Romani,"—from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of "Poetæ Græci," cut up by commentators, and served out by schoolmasters!

It was not the recollection of school, nor college learning, but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood which made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.

Away from our people and our horses, Methley and I went loitering along, by the willowy banks of a stream that crept in quietness through the low, even plain. There was no stir of weather over-head—no sound of rural labor—no sign of life in the land, but all the earth was dead, and still, as though it had