If I were to try and set down here the really happy memories which I have of Spring Grove they would be three. The first was the revelation of Greece which was afforded me by Homer and Plato. The surging music and tremendous themes of the poet, the sweet persuasion of the sophist were a wonder and delight. I remember even now the thrill with which I heard my form-master translate for us the prayer with which the _Phædrus_ closes: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place...." Beloved Pan! My knowledge of Pan was of the vaguest, and yet more than once or twice did I utter that prayer wandering alone the playing field, or watching the evening mist roll down the Thames Valley and blot up the elm trees, thick and white, clinging to the day like a fleece. The third Iliad again I have never forgotten, nor the twenty-fourth; nor the picture of the two gods, like vulture birds, watching the battle from the dead tree. Nor, again, do I ever fail to recapture the beat of the heart with which I apprehended some of Homer's phrases: "Sandy Pylos," Argos "the pasture land of horses," or "clear-seen" Ithaca. These things happened upon by chance in the dusty class-room, in the close air of that terrible hour from two to three, were as the opening of shutters to the soul, revealing blue distances, dim fields, or the snowy peaks of mountains in the sun. One seemed to lift, one could forget. It lasted but an instant; but time is of no account to the inner soul, of no more account than it is to God. I have never forgotten these moments of escape; nor can I leave Homer without confessing that his books became my Bible. I accepted his theology implicitly; I swallowed it whole. The Godhead of the Olympians, the lesser divinity of Thetis and Alpheios and Xanthos were indisputable. They were infinitely more real to me than the deities of my own land; and though I have found room for these later on in life, it has not been by displacing the others. Nor is there any need for that, so far as I see. I say that out of Homer I took his Gods; I add that I took them instantly. I seemed to breathe the air of their breath; they appealed to my reason; I knew that they had existed and did still exist. I was not shocked or shaken in my faith, either, by anything I read about them. Young as I was and insipient, I was prepared for what is called the burlesque Olympus of the Iliad, so grievous to Professor Murray. I think I recognised then, what seems perfectly plain to me now, that you might as well think meanly of a God of Africa because the natives make him of a cocoanut on a stick, as of Zeus and Hera because Homer says that they played peccant husband and jealous wife. If Homer halted it is rash to assume that Hephaistos did. The pathetic fallacy has crept in here. Mythology was one of the few subjects I diligently read at school, and all I got out of it was pure profit--for I realised that the Gods' world was not