| CHAPTER XX
| -1 | |
| FAILURE (1871)
| 0 | |
| FAR back in childhood, among its earliest memories, Henry Adams
could recall his first visit to Harvard College. He must have
been nine years old when on one of the singularly gloomy winter
afternoons which beguiled Cambridgeport, his mother drove him out
to visit his aunt, Mrs. Everett. Edward Everett was then
President of the college and lived in the old President's House
on Harvard Square. The boy remembered the drawing-room, on the
left of the hall door, in which Mrs. Everett received them. He
remembered a marble greyhound in the corner. The house had an air
of colonial self-respect that impressed even a nine-year-old
child.
| 1 | |
| When Adams closed his interview with President Eliot, he asked
the Bursar about his aunt's old drawing-room, for the house had
been turned to base uses. The room and the deserted kitchen
adjacent to it were to let. He took them. Above him, his brother
Brooks, then a law student, had rooms, with a private staircase.
Opposite was J. R. Dennett, a young instructor almost as literary
as Adams himself, and more rebellious to conventions. Inquiry
revealed a boarding-table, somewhere in the neighborhood, also
supposed to be superior in its class. Chauncey Wright, Francis
Wharton, Dennett, John Fiske, or their equivalents in learning
and lecture, were seen there, among three or four law students
like Brooks Adams. With these primitive arrangements, all of them
had to be satisfied. The standard was below that of Washington,
but it was, for the moment, the best.
| 2 | |
| For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to
waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in
trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran
on, till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think
whether he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done
to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy
himself what to do.
| 3 | |
| The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate
must have been more or less just, for the college was making a
great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected
President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor
Gurney was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand
on his own department of History. The two full Professors of
History -- Torrey and Gurney, charming men both -- could not
cover the ground. Between Gurney's classical courses and Torrey's
modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was
expected to fill. The students had already elected courses
numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or
who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was
in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in
their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down
to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the
face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or
less, to the Middle Ages.
| 4 | |
| Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be
ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he
had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to
swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent
gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life,
but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can
never tell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to
teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if
he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a
mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but
morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex
still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a
record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or
denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the
pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists,
plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite
of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either
to be taught as such -- or falsified.
| 5 | |
| Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to
teach, and could not make the facts fit one. He had no fancy for
telling agreeable tales to amuse sluggish-minded boys, in order
to publish them afterwards as lectures. He could still less
compel his students to learn the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the
Venerable Bede by heart. He saw no relation whatever between his
students and the Middle Ages unless it were the Church, and there
the ground was particularly dangerous. He knew better than though
he were a professional historian that the man who should solve
the riddle of the Middle Ages and bring them into the line of
evolution from past to present, would be a greater man than
Lamarck or Linnaeus; but history had nowhere broken down so
pitiably, or avowed itself so hopelessly bankrupt, as there.
Since Gibbon, the spectacle was almost a scandal. History had
lost even the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the
experimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less
instructive than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas.
| 6 | |
| All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler,
McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers
who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more
scandalous. No doubt, a teacher might make some use of these
writers or their theories; but Adams could fit them into no
theory of his own. The college expected him to pass at least half
his time teaching the boys a few elementary dates and relations,
that they might not be a disgrace to the university. This was
formal; and he could frankly tell the boys that, provided they
passed their examinations, they might get their facts where they
liked, and use the teacher only for questions. The only privilege
a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to
the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His
only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He
had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and
induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body
of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than
half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is
one of its cost in money.
| 7 | |
| The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much
that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all. Barred from
philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students
something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds
were of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely
one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any
inducements a teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and in
seven years of contact, Adams never had cause to complain of one;
but nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface;
only the tenth sensibly reacts.
| 8 | |
| Adams thought that, as no one seemed to care what he did, he
would try to cultivate this tenth mind, though necessarily at the
expense of the other nine. He frankly acted on the rule that a
teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to
teach his scholars what he did not know, but should join them in
trying to find the best way of learning it. The rather
pretentious name of historical method was sometimes given to this
process of instruction, but the name smacked of German pedagogy,
and a young professor who respected neither history nor method,
and whose sole object of interest was his students' minds, fell
into trouble enough without adding to it a German parentage.
| 9 | |
| The task was doomed to failure for a reason which he could not
control. Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but,
when learned, it has little use. History is a tangled skein that
one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled
enough; but complexity precedes evolution. The Pteraspis grins
horribly from the closed entrance. One may not begin at the
beginning, and one has but the loosest relative truths to follow
up. Adams found himself obliged to force his material into some
shape to which a method could be applied. He could think only of
law as subject; the Law School as end; and he took, as victims of
his experiment, half-a-dozen highly intelligent young men who
seemed willing to work. The course began with the beginning, as
far as the books showed a beginning in primitive man, and came
down through the Salic Franks to the Norman English. Since no
textbooks existed, the professor refused to profess, knowing no
more than his students, and the students read what they pleased
and compared their results. As pedagogy, nothing could be more
triumphant. The boys worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over
the field of archaic society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown
languages yielded before their attack, and customary law became
familiar as the police court; undoubtedly they learned, after a
fashion, to chase an idea, like a hare, through as dense a
thicket of obscure facts as they were likely to meet at the bar;
but their teacher knew from his own experience that his wonderful
method led nowhere, and they would have to exert themselves to
get rid of it in the Law School even more than they exerted
themselves to acquire it in the college. Their science had no
system, and could have none, since its subject was merely
antiquarian. Try as hard as he might, the professor could not
make it actual.
| 10 | |
| What was the use of training an active mind to waste its
energy? The experiments might in time train Adams as a professor,
but this result was still less to his taste. He wanted to help
the boys to a career, but not one of his many devices to
stimulate the intellectual reaction of the student's mind
satisfied either him or the students. For himself he was clear
that the fault lay in the system, which could lead only to
inertia. Such little knowledge of himself as he possessed
warranted him in affirming that his mind required conflict,
competition, contradiction even more than that of the student. He
too wanted a rank-list to set his name upon. His reform of the
system would have begun in the lecture-room at his own desk. He
would have seated a rival assistant professor opposite him, whose
business should be strictly limited to expressing opposite views.
Nothing short of this would ever interest either the professor or
the student; but of all university freaks, no irregularity
shocked the intellectual atmosphere so much as contradiction or
competition between teachers. In that respect the
thirteenth-century university system was worth the whole teaching
of the modern school.
| 11 | |
| All his pretty efforts to create conflicts of thought among his
students failed for want of system. None met the needs of
instruction. In spite of President Eliot's reforms and his
steady, generous, liberal support, the system remained costly,
clumsy and futile. The university -- as far as it was represented
by Henry Adams -- produced at great waste of time and money
results not worth reaching.
| 12 | |
| He made use of his lost two years of German schooling to
inflict their results on his students, and by a happy chance he
was in the full tide of fashion. The Germans were crowning their
new emperor at Versailles, and surrounding his head with a halo
of Pepins and Merwigs, Othos and Barbarossas. James Bryce had
even discovered the Holy Roman Empire. Germany was never so
powerful, and the Assistant Professor of History had nothing else
as his stock in trade. He imposed Germany on his scholars with a
heavy hand. He was rejoiced; but he sometimes doubted whether
they should be grateful. On the whole, he was content neither
with what he had taught nor with the way he had taught it. The
seven years he passed in teaching seemed to him lost.
| 13 | |
| The uses of adversity are beyond measure strange. As a
professor, he regarded himself as a failure. Without false
modesty he thought he knew what he meant. He had tried a great
many experiments, and wholly succeeded in none. He had succumbed
to the weight of the system. He had accomplished nothing that he
tried to do. He regarded the system as wrong; more mischievous to
the teachers than to the students; fallacious from the beginning
to end. He quitted the university at last, in 1877, with a
feeling. that, if it had not been for the invariable courtesy and
kindness shown by every one in it, from the President to the
injured students, he should be sore at his failure.
| 14 | |
| These were his own feelings, but they seemed not to be felt in
the college. With the same perplexing impartiality that had so
much disconcerted him in his undergraduate days, the college
insisted on expressing an opposite view. John Fiske went so far
in his notice of the family in "Appleton's Cyclopedia," as to say
that Henry had left a great reputation at Harvard College; which
was a proof of John Fiske's personal regard that Adams heartily
returned; and set the kind expression down to camaraderie. The
case was different when President Eliot himself hinted that
Adams's services merited recognition. Adams could have wept on
his shoulder in hysterics, so grateful was he for the rare
good-will that inspired the compliment; but he could not allow
the college to think that he esteemed himself entitled to
distinction. He knew better, and his was among the failures which
were respectable enough to deserve self-respect. Yet nothing in
the vanity of life struck him as more humiliating than that
Harvard College, which he had persistently criticised, abused,
abandoned, and neglected, should alone have offered him a dollar,
an office, an encouragement, or a kindness. Harvard College might
have its faults, but at least it redeemed America, since it was
true to its own.
| 15 | |
| The only part of education that the professor thought a success
was the students. He found them excellent company. Cast more or
less in the same mould, without violent emotions or sentiment,
and, except for the veneer of American habits, ignorant of all
that man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burst open like
flowers at the sunlight of a suggestion. They were quick to
respond; plastic to a mould; and incapable of fatigue. Their
faith in education was so full of pathos that one dared not ask
them what they thought they could do with education when they got
it. Adams did put the question to one of them, and was surprised
at the answer: "The degree of Harvard College is worth money to
me in Chicago." This reply upset his experience; for the degree
of Harvard College had been rather a drawback to a young man in
Boston and Washington. So far as it went, the answer was good,
and settled one's doubts. Adams knew no better, although he had
given twenty years to pursuing the same education, and was no
nearer a result than they. He still had to take for granted many
things that they need not -- among the rest, that his teaching
did them more good than harm. In his own opinion the greatest
good he could do them was to hold his tongue. They needed much
faith then; they were likely to need more if they lived long.
| 16 | |
| He never knew whether his colleagues shared his doubts about
their own utility. Unlike himself, they knew more or less their
business. He could not tell his scholars that history glowed with
social virtue; the Professor of Chemistry cared not a chemical
atom whether society was virtuous or not. Adams could not pretend
that mediaeval society proved evolution; the Professor of Physics
smiled at evolution. Adams was glad to dwell on the virtues of
the Church and the triumphs of its art: the Professor of
Political Economy had to treat them as waste of force. They knew
what they had to teach; he did not. They might perhaps be frauds
without knowing it; but he knew certainly nothing else of
himself. He could teach his students nothing; he was only
educating himself at their cost.
| 17 | |
| Education, like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he
were a priest. The students alone satisfied. They thought they
gained something. Perhaps they did, for even in America and in
the twentieth century, life could not be wholly industrial. Adams
fervently hoped that they might remain content; but supposing
twenty years more to pass, and they should turn on him as
fiercely as he had turned on his old instructors -- what answer
could he make? The college had pleaded guilty, and tried to
reform. He had pleaded guilty from the start, and his reforms had
failed before those of the college.
| 18 | |
| The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was
worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of
political and corporate administration, but it could not look for
help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both
Congressmen and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The
same failure marked the society of a college. Several score of
the best- educated, most agreeable, and personally the most
sociable people in America united in Cambridge to make a social
desert that would have starved a polar bear. The liveliest and
most agreeable of men -- James Russell Lowell, Francis J. Child,
Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, Gurney, John Fiske, William
James and a dozen others, who would have made the joy of London
or Paris -- tried their best to break out and be like other men
in Cambridge and Boston, but society called them professors, and
professors they had to be. While all these brilliant men were
greedy for companionship, all were famished for want of it.
Society was a faculty-meeting without business. The elements were
there; but society cannot be made up of elements -- people who
are expected to be silent unless they have observations to make
-- and all the elements are bound to remain apart if required to
make observations.
| 19 | |
| Thus it turned out that of all his many educations, Adams
thought that of school-teacher the thinnest. Yet he was forced to
admit that the education of an editor, in some ways, was thinner
still. The editor had barely time to edit; he had none to write.
If copy fell short, he was obliged to scribble a book-review on
the virtues of the Anglo-Saxons or the vices of the Popes; for he
knew more about Edward the Confessor or Boniface VIII than he did
about President Grant. For seven years he wrote nothing; the
Review lived on his brother Charles's railway articles. The
editor could help others, but could do nothing for himself. As a
writer, he was totally forgotten by the time he had been an
editor for twelve months. As editor he could find no writer to
take his place for politics and affairs of current concern. The
Review became chiefly historical. Russell Lowell and Frank
Palgrave helped him to keep it literary. The editor was a
helpless drudge whose successes, if he made any, belonged to his
writers; but whose failures might easily bankrupt himself. Such a
Review may be made a sink of money with captivating ease. The
secrets of success as an editor were easily learned; the highest
was that of getting advertisements. Ten pages of advertising made
an editor a success; five marked him as a failure. The merits or
demerits of his literature had little to do with his results
except when they led to adversity.
| 20 | |
| A year or two of education as editor satiated most of his
appetite for that career as a profession. After a very slight
experience, he said no more on the subject. He felt willing to
let any one edit, if he himself might write. Vulgarly speaking,
it was a dog's life when it did not succeed, and little better
when it did. A professor had at least the pleasure of associating
with his students; an editor lived the life of an owl. A
professor commonly became a pedagogue or a pedant; an editor
became an authority on advertising. On the whole, Adams preferred
his attic in Washington. He was educated enough. Ignorance paid
better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a month.
| 21 | |
| With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he
best could, with such accidental education as luck had given him;
but he held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin
again, he would do it on a better system. He thought he knew
nearly what system to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had
not yet got his head above water so far as to serve for a model,
as he did twenty or thirty years afterwards; but the editorship
of the North American Review had one solitary merit; it made the
editor acquainted at a distance with almost every one in the
country who could write or who could be the cause of writing.
Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever people
as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at their
treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type
and model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the
American, as he conceived, should have been and was not.
| 22 | |
| Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered
much less to them than the extent of his friendship, for
geologists were as a class not much better off than himself, and
friends were sorely few. One of his friends from earliest
childhood, and nearest neighbor in Quincy, Frank Emmons, had
become a geologist and joined the Fortieth Parallel Survey under
Government. At Washington in the winter of 1869-70, Emmons had
invited Adams to go out with him on one of the field-parties in
summer. Of course when Adams took the Review he put it at the
service of the Survey, and regretted only that he could not do
more. When the first year of professing and editing was at last
over, and his July North American appeared, he drew a long breath
of relief, and took the next train for the West. Of his year's
work he was no judge. He had become a small spring in a large
mechanism, and his work counted only in the sum; but he had been
treated civilly by everybody, and he felt at home even in Boston.
Putting in his pocket the July number of the North American, with
a notice of the Fortieth Parallel Survey by Professor J. D.
Whitney, he started for the plains and the Rocky Mountains.
| 23 | |
| In the year 1871, the West was still fresh, and the Union
Pacific was young. Beyond the Missouri River, one felt the
atmosphere of Indians and buffaloes. One saw the last vestiges of
an old education, worth studying if one would; but it was not
that which Adams sought; rather, he came out to spy upon the land
of the future. The Survey occasionally borrowed troopers from the
nearest station in case of happening on hostile Indians, but
otherwise the topographers and geologists thought more about
minerals than about Sioux. They held under their hammers a
thousand miles of mineral country with all its riddles to solve,
and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt the future
in their hands.
| 24 | |
| Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge
of Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter
nothing to the story of education. They were all hardened
mountaineers and surveyors who took everything for granted, and
spared each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch
life, the stories of the big game they killed. A bear was an
occasional amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the
only wild animal dangerous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk.
One shot for amusement, but one had other matters to talk about.
| 25 | |
| Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he
was in a manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to
wander off alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain
stream or exploring a valley. One morning when the party was
camped high above Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he
borrowed a rod, and rode down over a rough trail into Estes Park,
for some trout. The day was fine, and hazy with the smoke of
forest fires a thousand miles away; the park stretched its
English beauties off to the base of its bordering mountains in
natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream was just fishy
enough to tempt lingering along its banks. Hour after hour the
sun moved westward and the fish moved eastward, or disappeared
altogether, until at last when the fisherman cinched his mule,
sunset was nearer than he thought. Darkness caught him before he
could catch his trail. Not caring to tumble into some fifty-foot
hole, he "allowed" he was lost, and turned back. In half-an-hour
he was out of the hills, and under the stars of Estes Park, but
he saw no prospect of supper or of bed.
| 26 | |
| Estes Park was large enough to serve for a bed on a summer
night for an army of professors, but the supper question offered
difficulties. There was but one cabin in the Park, near its
entrance, and he felt no great confidence in finding it, but he
thought his mule cleverer than himself, and the dim lines of
mountain crest against the stars fenced his range of error. The
patient mule plodded on without other road than the gentle slope
of the ground, and some two hours must have passed before a light
showed in the distance. As the mule came up to the cabin door,
two or three men came out to see the stranger.
| 27 | |
| One of these men was Clarence King on his way up to the camp.
Adams fell into his arms. As with most friendships, it was never
a matter of growth or doubt. Friends are born in archaic
horizons; they were shaped with the Pteraspis in Siluria; they
have nothing to do with the accident of space. King had come up
that day from Greeley in a light four-wheeled buggy, over a trail
hardly fit for a commissariat mule, as Adams had reason to know
since he went back in the buggy. In the cabin, luxury provided a
room and one bed for guests. They shared the room and the bed,
and talked till far towards dawn.
| 28 | |
| King had everything to interest and delight Adams. He knew more
than Adams did of art and poetry; he knew America, especially
west of the hundredth meridian, better than any one; he knew the
professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he
did the professor. He knew even women; even the American woman;
even the New York woman, which is saying much. Incidentally he
knew more practical geology than was good for him, and saw ahead
at least one generation further than the text-books. That he saw
right was a different matter. Since the beginning of time no man
has lived who is known to have seen right; the charm of King was
that he saw what others did and a great deal more. His wit and
humor; his bubbling energy which swept every one into the current
of his interest; his personal charm of youth and manners; his
faculty of giving and taking, profusely, lavishly, whether in
thought or in money as though he were Nature herself, marked him
almost alone among Americans. He had in him something of the
Greek -- a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander. One Clarence King
only existed in the world.
| 29 | |
| A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years
old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an
avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are
hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life,
a community of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and
all their generation, was at that moment passing the critical
point of his career. The one, coming from the west, saturated
with the sunshine of the Sierras, met the other, drifting from
the east, drenched in the fogs of London, and both had the same
problems to handle -- the same stock of implements -- the same
field to work in; above all, the same obstacles to overcome.
| 30 | |
| As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the
quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even
distant rivalry on this ground. Adams could never tell a story,
chiefly because he always forgot it; and he was never guilty of a
witticism, unless by accident. King and the Fortieth Parallel
influenced him in a way far more vital. The lines of their lives
converged, but King had moulded and directed his life logically,
scientifically, as Adams thought American life should be
directed. He had given himself education all of a piece, yet
broad. Standing in the middle of his career, where their paths at
last came together, he could look back and look forward on a
straight line, with scientific knowledge for its base. Adams's
life, past or future, was a succession of violent breaks or
waves, with no base at all. King's abnormal energy had already
won him great success. None of his contemporaries had done so
much, single-handed, or were likely to leave so deep a trail. He
had managed to induce Congress to adopt almost its first modern
act of legislation. He had organized, as a civil -- not military
-- measure, a Government Survey. He had paralleled the
Continental Railway in Geology; a feat as yet unequalled by other
governments which had as a rule no continents to survey. He was
creating one of the classic scientific works of the century. The
chances were great that he could, whenever he chose to quit the
Government service, take the pick of the gold and silver, copper
or coal, and build up his fortune as he pleased. Whatever prize
he wanted lay ready for him -- scientific social, literary,
political -- and he knew how to take them in turn. With ordinary
luck he would die at eighty the richest and most many-sided
genius of his day.
| 31 | |
| So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of
his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so
that women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women
were many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much
their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be. The
women were jealous because, at heart, King had no faith in the
American woman; he loved types more robust.
| 32 | |
| The young men of the Fortieth Parallel had Californian
instincts; they were brothers of Bret Harte. They felt no
leanings towards the simple uniformities of Lyell and Darwin;
they saw little proof of slight and imperceptible changes; to
them, catastrophe was the law of change; they cared little for
simplicity and much for complexity; but it was the complexity of
Nature, not of New York or even of the Mississippi Valley. King
loved paradox; he started them like rabbits, and cared for them
no longer, when caught or lost; but they delighted Adams, for
they helped, among other things, to persuade him that history was
more amusing than science. The only question left open to doubt
was their relative money value.
| 33 | |
| In Emmons's camp, far up in the Uintahs, these talks were
continued till the frosts became sharp in the mountains. History
and science spread out in personal horizons towards goals no
longer far away. No more education was possible for either man.
Such as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world
they lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge, to take
up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was
harnessed to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had
done its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.
| 34 | |
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