There was Wilde, in the days after the peacock blue, the velveteens, and the shirt-cuffs turned over his jacket sleeves had been renounced. There was the gathering in the old stable beside Kelmscott House, where Wilde held forth. "I have never answered letters," he said, "I have known men come to London full of bright prospects, and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." And again, "Mr. Bernard Shaw has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." And of course William Morris was there, and sometimes Shaw, and Russian anarchists, and socialists. With them was young Yeats who shortly before, while he attended the Killdare School had disliked George Eliot's work, and had admired the pictures of French monuments in magazines, except when he had first discussed them with his father.
Wilde had persuaded him to try his fortune in London. "Art is art because it is not nature," he had believed, but there was a change wrought by those days, forty years ago. He moved in Wilde's circle and learned that it did not matter whether the sun went round the earth, or the earth round the sun. The patriots seized upon him, and his was the "Celtic" art. Today he is at Leverett House, today he is in Boston.
If there is a golden book, the vade mecum of everything worth keeping by in life, it is the memories of men known. This is the Vagabond's creed. Today his spirit will haunt old McKinlock, and perhaps will gain, as William Butler Yeats himself was the gainer from those afternoons at the stable beside Kelmscott House.
Today
9 O'Clock
"Shelley," Professor Munn, Emerson A.
10 O'Clock
"England in the Napoleonic Era," Professor Abbott, Emerson 11.
11 O'Clock
"Jane Austen," Professor Maynadier, Sever 11.
"Young America," Professor Baxter, Harvard 1.
"Beginnings of Nationalism," Professor Merk.
"Parthenon," Professor Chase, Fogg Large Room.
12 O'Clock
"Objective Idealism," Professor Hocking, Emerson D.
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NORTH OF BOSTON