This was his first
Gethsemane. For ten years buffeted and beaten, battling with adversity,
sometimes losing but never lost, snatching learning here and there,
hating sham, loving passionately, misunderstood, misapprehended, too
stubbornly proud to ask apologies or make useless explanations, fighting
poverty in the depths of privation, wrestling existence from toil he
loathed, befriending many and also befriended much, but always face to
face with the grim tragedy which has held part of the stage since Eden.
"Such was the second decade. The first was spent on hill sides where
shadows only made the light more buoyant as they fled away. The second
was passed in the valley where the shadow hung lazily till the cloud
grew very black and drenched the soil.
"Lured to college, he undertook to acquire academic culture. As is
well known, college life with its professorial anecdotes and jokes, its
student pranks and grind, is routine drudgery and cob-webbery prose.
Bookish professors and conventional students rarely have just such an
animate problem of French artistry and Bohemian experience to solve.
They did nobly, to be sure, but here was a mind which threw over them
all the glamour of romance."
Mr. Wright entered the Preparatory Department of Hiram College at the
age of twenty, having previously accepted the faith and identified
himself with the Christian Church in the little quarry town of Grafton,
Ohio.
Pages:
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261