But the same good fortune pursued him throughout. He seemed predestined
to environments of beauty. When, at fourteen, he left his Mexican home,
it was to go to the Hackley School at Tarrytown, N.Y., an institution
placed on a high hill overlooking that noblest of rivers, the Hudson,
and surrounded by a domain of its own, extending to many acres
of meadow and woodland. An attack of scarlet fever in his childhood
had left his health far from robust, and it was thought
that the altitude of Mexico City was too great for him.
He therefore spent one of his vacations among the hills of New Hampshire,
and was afterwards given a year out of school, with the family
of his former tutor, in Southern California--again a region
famed for its beauty. He returned much improved in health,
and after a concluding year at Hackley, he entered Harvard College in 1906.
He now plunged into wide and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard,
and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at college,
his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and contemplative
than towards the active life. His brother, at this time,
appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition;
and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting,
with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals
of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk,
deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume
than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle
of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought
and of action. He emerged from his shell, made many friends,
and threw himself with great zest into the social life of his comrades.
It is evident, however, that this did not mean any slackening
in his literary interests. His work gives ample proof of real,
if not of systematic, culture. He genuinely loves and has made his own
many of the great things of the past. His translations from
Dante and Ariosto, for example, show no less sympathy than accomplishment.
Very characteristic is his selection of the Twenty-sixth Canto
of the 'Inferno', in which the narrative of Ulysses brings with it
a breath from the great romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy
that before he graduated he took up with zeal and with distinction
the study of Celtic literature--a corrective, perhaps, in its cooler tones,
to the tropical motives with which his mind was stored.
He was one of the editors of the 'Harvard Monthly', to which he made
frequent contributions of verse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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