German prose never became really easy to me in the sense that French prose did, but for German poetry I cared as much as for English poetry.

Above all, I gained an impression of the German people which I never got over.

From that time to this it would have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans were really foreigners.
The affection, the _Gemuthlichkeit_ (a quality which cannot be exactly expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work, the sense of duty, the delight in studying literature and science, the pride in the new Germany, the more than kind and friendly interest in three strange children--all these manifestations of the German character and of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did not in the least define at the time, but which is very vivid still forty years later.
When I got back to America, at the age of fifteen, I began serious study to enter Harvard under Mr.Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler School in New York.

I could not go to school because I knew so much less than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others.

In science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German and French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and mathematics.