1 90 The Poets and Nature. 



ones likely to have attracted the notice of such "impres- 

 sionist " persons as poets. 



"The silver moth enjoys the gloom 

 Glancing on tremulous wing through twilight bow'rs, 

 Now flits where warm nasturtiums glow, 

 Now quivers on the jasmine bough, 

 And sucks with spiral tongue the balm of sleeping flowers." 



As a boy at school I was an inveterate "collector" of 

 objects of natural history, and my " museum " was at once 

 the envy and the despair of my contemporaries. That I 

 neglected my duties for my pleasures goes without saying, as 

 all boys do this. But I did so systematically, doggedly, and 

 triumphantly. Fifteen years later I went back to my old 

 school. They wanted to hear " an old boy's " adventures as 

 a traveller and a war-correspondent, and I met many of my 

 masters, and to them I confessed the unsuspected obliquities 

 of my school career. I had never in seven years learned 

 one single proposition of Euclid. No, not even the first. 

 I had never achieved an algebraic equation. No, not one. 

 I loathed mathematics with a profundity that even the loath- 

 ing for rhubarb and magnesia could not surpass. So I 

 shirked and cribbed during these lessons with such resolution 

 and judgment that I was actually able to leave school 

 congratulating myself on never having done a proposition 

 or a sum in a legitimate way. At mathematical examinations 

 I used to send up blank papers, or coolly return myself as 

 absent. 



In after life, when I first began to write for publication, I 

 found myself handicapped by my total ignorance of precise 

 terms, such as mathematics teaches, so, at my leisure, I read 

 Logic and Metaphysics for three years, and thus qualified 

 for the Professor's Chair of these sciences at the Allahabad 

 College in India. The balance was thus equalised, you say, 

 but was it ? I found myself with all my sympathy for nature 

 to the good. For no man, when his ideas are fixed, his 



