So I discovered one of the embarrassments of the American college system. Students are supposed to choose courses, but no provision is made for them to sample the wares and make an intelligent selection. If anybody finds he has made a mistake, he is in the same plight as if he has married the wrong girl; he can not get out without hurting the girl’s feelings, and I, unhappy blunderer in the undergraduate machine, had to hurt the feelings of Professor Carpenter. “I don’t know what you want,” said he, “or how you think you are going to get it; but this one thing I can tell you positively—you don’t know how to write.” To which I answered humbly, of course; that was why I had to come to him. But I had become convinced that I wasn’t going to learn in that way, and my mind was made up to drop the course.
Also I took a course in poetry with William Peterfield Trent. The predecessors of Milton were the subject of our investigation, I remember, and perhaps they were uninteresting poets—anyhow, the lectures about them certainly were. I stood it for a month or two, and then we came upon a grammatical error in one of our poets. “You will find such things occasionally,” said the professor. “There is a line in Byron—‘There let him lay’—and I have an impression that I once came upon a similar error in Shelley. Some day before long I plan to read Shelley through and see if I can find it.” And that finished me. Shelley was my dearest friend in all the world, and I imagined a man confronting the record of his ecstasies, seeking a grammatical error! I quit that course.
Also I had started one in French. It was the same dreary routine I had gone through for five years in Latin; translating little foolish sentences by looking up words in the dictionary. I seriously meant to read French, so stayed long enough to get the accent correctly, and then retired, and got myself a note-book and set to work to hammer the meaning of French words into my head. In another six weeks I had read half a dozen of the best French novels, and in the course of the next year I read all the standard French classics. I did the same thing with German; having already got the pronunciation, I proceeded to teach myself words, and in a year or two had got to know German literature as well as English.