I took six or eight courses each half year at the college, and as I recall them, my principal impression is of their incredible dullness. For example, the tired little gentleman who taught me what was called “English”; I remember a book of lessons, each lesson consisting of thirty or forty sentences containing grammatical errors. I would open the book and run down the list; I would see all the grammatical errors in the first three minutes, and for the remaining fifty-seven minutes was required to sit and listen while one member of the class after another was called on to explain and correct one of the errors. The cruelty of this procedure lay in the fact that you never knew at what moment your name would be called, and you would have to know what was the next sentence. If you didn’t know, you were not “paying attention,” and you got a zero. I tried all kinds of psychological tricks to compel myself to follow that dreary routine, but was powerless to chain my mind to it. Then there was “history”; first the history of the world, ancient and modern, and then the history of England. I remember the tall, stringy old gentleman who taught us lists of names and dates, which we recited one hour and forgot the next. Here, if you were caught not paying attention, it was possible to use your wits and “get by.” I remember one bright moment when we were discussing the birth of the first prince of Wales. Said the professor: “How did it happen that an English prince, the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” The student, caught unawares by this singular question, stammered, “Why—er—why—his mother was there!” Also there were the physics classes; rather less dull, because they included “experiments,” which exhibited the peculiarities of natural forces—sparks and smoke, and noises of explosions major or minor. But why these things happened, or what they meant, was never understood by anyone, and whether an explosion was major or minor was entirely a matter of luck. I remember composing a poem for the college paper, dealing with the effect of physics upon a poet’s mind: He learned that the painted rainbow, God’s promise, as poets feign, Was transverse oscillations Turning somersaults in rain. And then there was drawing. We sat in a big studio, in front of plaster casts of historic faces, and we made smudges supposed to resemble them. On this subject, also, I wrote some verses, portraying the plight of a student who forgot which cast he was copying, and paced up and down before them, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno or King Henry of Navarre?”