Naturally this pronouncement had a most disastrous effect on me. That
their diagnosis proved in the end to be wrong mattered nothing, since
the injury had been done and could not be undone if I lived a century.
For the blow had fallen at the most critical period in life, the
period of transition when the newly-awakened mind is in its freshest,
most receptive stage, and is most curious, most eager, when knowledge
is most readily assimilated, and, above everything, when the
foundations of character and the entire life of the man are laid.
I speak, it will be understood, of a mind that had not been trained or
pressed into a mould or groove by schoolmasters and schools-of a mind
that was a forest wilding rather than a plant, one in ten thousand
like it, grown under glass in a prepared soil, in a nursery.
That I had to say good-bye to all thoughts of a career, all bright
dreams of the future which recent readings had put into my mind, was
not felt as the chief loss, it was in fact a small matter compared
with the dreadful thought that I must soon resign this earthly life
which was so much more to me, as I could not help thinking, than to
most others. I was like that young man with a ghastly face I had seen
bound to a post in our barn; or like any wretched captive, tied hand
and foot and left to lie there until it suited his captor to come back
and cut his throat or thrust him through with a spear, or cut him into
strips with a sword, in a leisurely manner so as to get all the
satisfaction possible out of the exercise of his skill and the
spectacle of gushing blood and his victim's agony.
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