Leaving the school was a melancholy business; one's roots were
entwined very deep with the soil, the buildings, the memories, the
happiness of the place--for happy above all things it was--in the
last few weeks there were many strange emotional outbursts from
boys who had seemed conventional enough; and there was a dreary
sense that life was at an end, and would have little of future
brightness or excitement to provide. I packed, I made my farewells,
I distributed presents; and as I drove away, the carriage,
ascending the bridge by the beloved playing-fields, with its lawns
and elms, the gliding river and the castle towering up behind,
showed me in a glance the old red-brick walls, the turrets, the
high chapel, with its pinnacles and great buttresses, where seven
good years had been spent. I burst, I remember, into unashamed
tears; but no sense of regret for failure, or idleness, or vacuous
case, or absence of all fine intention, came over me, though I had
been guilty of all these things. I wish that I had felt remorse!
But I was only grateful and fond and sad at leaving so untroubled
and delightful a piece of life behind me. The world ahead did not
seem to me to hold out anything which I burned to do or to achieve;
it was but the closing of a door, the end of a chapter, the sudden
silencing of a music, sweet to hear, which could not come again.
That was all five-and-thirty years ago! Since that time--I have
seen it unmistakably, both as a schoolmaster and as a don--a
different spirit has grown up, a sense of corporate and social
duty, a larger idea of national service, not loudly advertised but
deeply rooted, and far removed from the undisciplined individualism
of my boyhood.
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