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from the world outside an open window.
    Inside, in a room that was hers and an hour that was hers—for each period in the schedule of my school day still in those years would become a realm of expectancy for me—the poem came as an offering. It may have been a diversion or a reward after duties in our course of instruction. She had presented it as something more, a personal communication. “I have brought a poem today, not as part of your required reading,” did she say? or “not belonging to English Literature, but to my own world, a confidence, a gift, or share?” It was clear, anyway, that for her as for us, much of what we had to read was the matter of a prescribed course and not of our own explorations. We were a group set apart from the mass of those attending high school, a few by their special aptitudes, but most of us by our being the sons and daughters of college graduates, and all of our courses of study were designed to prepare us for entrance examinations for college. We were in the proving ground of the professional middle class, where we were to learn by heart the signs and passwords of that class. Not only cases and tenses, histories and zoologies, but news reports and musical appreciations and the reading of novels and poems were to become critical tests in the would-be initiate’s meeting the requirements of a cultural set.
    Books had opened in childhood imaginations of other lives, dwelling in which the idea of my own life to be had taken on depths and heights, colors and figures, a ground beyond self or personality in the idea of Man. In fairy tales and in romances, old orders overthrown by the middle class lived on in the beginnings of an inner life, kings and knights long deposed by merchants and landlords, peasants and craftsmen swept aside by the Industrial Revolution, once powers and workers in the realities of the actual world passed now into the subversive realm of the irreal. In each of our histories, we were to repeat the historical victory of the Rise of Capitalism. Were there “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,” we were schooled not to be taken in by them but to take themin, to appreciate the poet’s fancy, even as our forefathers no longer worshipped grove and fountain but exploited wood and water power as public utilities. English Lit with its reading lists, its established texts and tests, was to map in our minds the wilderness yet to be converted to our proper uses from the already developed areas of our real estate. Work by work, author by author, the right roads were paved and marked, the important sights were emphasized, the civic improvements were pointed out where the human spirit had been successfully converted to illustrate the self-respectability of civil men, and the doubtful, impulsively created areas or the adventuring tracks into back-country were deplored. If we, in turn, could be taught to appreciate, to evaluate, as we read, to improve our sensibilities in the ground of other men’s passions, to taste and to regulate, to establish our estimations of worth in the marketplace, we were to win some standing in the ranks of an educated middle class as college graduates, urbane and professional, as our parents had done before us.
    But there were times when Miss Keough all but confided that the way of reading required by our project was not only tedious but wronged what we read; and there were other times when—even among these things we were supposed to acquire among our cultural properties—she would present some poem or story as if it belonged not to what every well-read person must know, the matter of a public establishment, but to that earlier, atavistic, inner life of the person. Scott’s
Ivanhoe
and Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
would be essential to our picture of English culture and society, but Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
or Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
were of a different order—the