In the following year our Politics found a fresh vent through the establishment of _The Harrovian_. I had dabbled in composition ever since I was ten, and had printed both prose and verse before I entered Harrow School. So here was a heaven-sent contributor, and one morning, in the autumn of 1869, as I was coming out of First School, one[9] of the Editors overtook me and said-- "We want you to contribute to _The Harrovian_. We are only going to employ fellows who can write English--not such stuff as 'The following boys _were given prizes_.'" Purism indeed! Here began my journalistic career. For three years I wrote a considerable part of the paper, and I was an Editor during my last year, in conjunction with my friends Dumbar Barton and Walter Sichel. Harrow is sometimes said to be the most musical of Public Schools; and certainly our School Songs have attained a wide popularity. I believe that "Forty Years on" is sung all over the world. But, when I went to Harrow, we were confined to the traditional English songs and ballads, and to some Latin ditties by Bradby and Westcott, which we bellowed lustily but could not always construe. E. E. Bowen's stirring, though often bizarre, compositions (admirably set to music by John Farmer) began soon after I entered the school, and E. W. Howson's really touching and melodious verses succeeded Bowens' some ten years after I had left. Other song-writers, of greater or less merit, we have had; but from first to last, the thrilling spell of a Harrow concert has been an experience quite apart from all other musical enjoyments. "The singing is the thing. When you hear the great body of fresh voices leap up like a lark from the ground, and rise and swell and swell and rise till the rafters seem to crack and shiver, then you seem to have discovered all the sources of feeling." This was the tribute of a stranger, and an Harrovian has recorded the same emotion:--"John was singing like a lark, with a lark's spontaneous delight in singing; with an ease and self-abandonment which charmed eye almost as much as ear. Higher and higher rose the clear, sexless notes, till two of them met and mingled in a triumphant trill. To Desmond, that trill was the answer to the quavering, troubled cadences of the first verse; the vindication of the spirit soaring upwards unfettered by the flesh--the pure spirit, not released from the human clay without a fierce struggle. At that moment Desmond loved the singer--the singer who called to him out of heaven, who summoned his friend to join him, to see what he saw--'the vision splendid.'"[10]