The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 Read Online Free PDF Page B

quite a feat,
3000 ft., and in the heat.
To make a lengthy story short,
We did not take the path we ought,
And though we exerted all our powers,
It took us all of two three long hours
To reach the top, when, what a view,
Mount Washington, and Montreal too!
We took one hour down the road,
Then two hours more to our abode.
I suppose now I should desist, 

For I am needed to assist
In making a raft.
           The family sends
To you their love and complimen’s.
I must not close without once more a
Health to you and Theodora.
    I am afraid this letter will not please you but I hope you will excuse your brother
Tom.
    1–Charlotte had married George Lawrence Smith, an architect, in Sept. 1903. Their daughter, Theodora, had been born on 25 July 1904. Charlotte studied at the St Louis and Boston Art Schools, specialising in sculpture. For her oil portrait of TSE, see Plate 15.
    2–In 1903 TSE’s uncle, Christopher Rhodes Eliot, had bought some land over the border in Canada, on Lake Memphremagog, as a site for a family camp. In the early years everyone slept under canvas. 
     
    Charlotte C. Eliot 1 TO the Head Master of Milton Academy 2
     
    MS Milton Academy
     
    27 March 1905
    2635 Locust St, St Louis
    My dear Mr Cobb,
    I write to ask whether at Milton Academy you will take a boy who has passed his finals for Harvard. My son is sixteen years of age and will be seventeen the 26th of September. As a scholar his rank is high, but he has been growing rapidly, and for the sake of his physical well being we have felt that it might be better for him to wait a year before entering on his college career. If you have any provision for such cases, and can keep him employed without his going over the same ground, please let me know, and oblige
Yours very truly,
Charlotte C. Eliot
Mrs Henry W. Eliot
    Tom passed his preliminaries with credits in two studies. Took Latin prize last year at Smith Academy. 3
    1–Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot, TSE’s mother; see Glossary of Names.
    2–In Milton, Massachusetts. Richard Cobb was Head Master, 1904–10.
    3–From 1898 to 1905 TSE was a dayboy at Smith Academy, which his grandfather had founded. ‘My memories of [it] are on the whole happy ones; and when, many years ago, I learned that the school had come to an end [in 1917], I felt that a link with the past had been painfully broken. It was a good school.’ He recalled with gratitude Mr Hatch, his English master, who ‘commended warmly my first poem [‘A Lyric’], written as a class exercise, at the same time asking me suspiciously if I had had any help in writing it … Well! so far as I am educated, I must pay my first tribute to Smith Academy; if I had not been well taught there, I should have been unable to profit elsewhere … I remember it as a good school also because of the boys who were there with me: it seems to me that, for a school of small numbers, we were a well-mixed variety of local types’ (from an Address delivered at Washington University, 9 June 1953). See ‘American Literature and the American Language’, To Criticise the Critic.  
     

    4 April 1905
    2635 Locust St, St Louis
    My dear Mr Cobb,
    Your letter was received yesterday, and I enclose today a list of studies taken here which my son has prepared. He and I have examined the catalogue you sent, and Tom thinks he could make out a course partly scientific, and then there are elective studies like ‘Advanced History, English and American’. Then he has had but two years of German, one with a poor teacher, and could resume that study, and drop French, in which he needs principally conversation. I should think he could drop Latin and Greek this year. He took the Latin prize last year at Smith Academy. His teacher informs him that in the Harvard preliminaries he received credit in French and English. He has always been a student, and read extensively in English literature, especially Shakespeare. He has read practically all of Shakespeare, whom he