| | 1 | Author: | Grahame, Kenneth | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Dream Days  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | IN the matter of general culture and attainments, we
youngsters stood on pretty level ground. True, it was always
happening that one of us would be singled out at any moment,
freakishly, and without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle
with the inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead;
while another, from some fancied artistic tendency which always
failed to justify itself, might be told off without warning to
hammer out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys
with tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to
either sex, and held to be
necessary even for him whose ambition soared no higher than to
crack a whip in a circus-ring—in geography, for instance,
arithmetic, or the weary doings of kings and queens—each would
have scorned to excel. And, indeed, whatever our individual
gifts, a general dogged determination to shirk and to evade kept
us all at much the same dead level,—a level of ignorance
tempered by insubordination. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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