Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadowed livery of the burnished sun'
THESE words, spoken as if from some spontaneous com-pulsion in a voice low and thrilled that itself seemed to glow, caused all the class of school-boys to turn their heads At the back of the room, behind the rest, sat a young Indian with thick hair falling about his forehead, and dark lustrous eyes. It was he who had startled us with his impassioned tones. Where had he come from? How had he mysteriously joined us? Perhaps I deceive myself, but to my memory this was my first sight of Manmohan Ghose an unaccountable apparition from an unknown hemisphere. The legendary East seemed suddenly to have projected a fragment of itself into our little world of everyday things and humdrum studies, disturbing it with colour, mystery, romance. No doubt I should not have been moved as I was had not the new-comer spoken the rich lines in a voice that betrayed the capacity to be intoxicated by poetry: and of such capacity I had found no trace in my class-mates. I felt immediate sympathy, and besides anyone foreign who brought a breath from a world outside the world of habit ever attracted me.
It must not be supposed that the words of Shakespeare were spoken out "of the blue," deliberately challenging an interval of silence. They came with startling aptness, but they came in response to a question The school was St Paul's, then lately removed from its ancient quarters in the City, which I myself still perversely lamented, for what amplitude of play-fields could make up for those solitary rambles about the by-ways of Cheapside, the towers and spires, the shipping in the Thames, the crowds and animation, the sense of history, of being in the centre of things, the deep-toned bells of the Cathedral sounding down the smoky air, the little seclusions of peace in the church-yard, the glory of the spaciousness beneath the dome? These had been my dreamy haunts We had been transferred to Hammersmith and prose. I was then in the seventh form, under the Sur-Master, Mr Lupton, who on this occasion was reading with us the Æneid. With the perhaps laudable aim of enlarging our vocabulary, he would press upon our reluctant or apathetic taste a choice of poetical epithets, such as Tennyson (whom, like everybody among our elders, so far as my experience went, he idolised) would employ to dress up his thoughts in Thus we were enjoined to speak of steeds rather than horses, not a sword, but a falchion, and on this particular occasion he suggested that livery might be a more sumptuous, Virgılıan word than clothes or dress. Could not one of us recall such a use of the word in our classics? He paused for a reply, expecting no doubt that, as usually happened, he would be reduced to supplying the apt quotation himself. But the reply came, and I think he was just a little disconcerted when the Prince of Morocco's appeal vibrated with such intensity of tone through the silent and astonished class room. Its dramatic emotion was something un-English We were not used to such things.
Manmohan Ghose and I made friends, and by degrees disclosed to each other our secret ambitions. We had long walks and talks together, discussing everything in heaven and earth, after the manner of youth, but especially poetry and the poets My home was indifferent to the arts, my school fellows also, so far as I knew them and it was a delight to expand in these talks on the subjects I cared for most. We had enough difference of taste to salt our conversation with arguments and dispute At that time I was in the stage of an ardent worship of Browning, but I think he never shared this enthusiasm.
He lived in lodgings with two brothers, but what his actual circumstances were when he came to England, and how he came to be at St Paul's, I do not think I ever inquired As to the School, the High Master, a notable and formidable personality famous for his prescience in judging of a boy's future capabilities, would at times, for his own reasons, insert a promising pupil into one of the upper forms without notice, and in the middle of the term hence my unconsciousness of having ever set eyes on Manmohan Ghose till all our heads were turned to the strange new-comer on that particular morning is not so improbable as it may seem.
But of Ghose's background I knew scarcely anything His enthusiasm for literature sufficed my curiosity.
He was well read in the English poets, better read than I in the Elizabethans and the older lyrists But what struck me most was his enthusiastic appreciation of Greek poetry, not so much the books prescribed in the school as those which he had sought out on his own account.
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