The friendships I made there will always remain the central ones
in my life. Up to my last term at college at the age of 24 I
still wore my chain-mail of artificial chastity; but then a
change gradually set in, and I began to understand the
relationship of the physical phenomena of sex to its intellectual
and imaginative manifestations. (I was not destined to fully
realize this for some years and then exclusively through and out
of my own personal experience.) It was the study of Walt
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ that first brought me light upon this
question. Hitherto I had kept the two things locked up, as it
were, in two separate air-tight compartments,--my friendships in
one, my sex instincts in another,--to be kept under and repressed
by the public-school code as I conceived it.
"It is needless to say that I was continually troubled by the
customary sex phenomena: erotic dreams, loss of semen,
troublesome erections at night, etc. These I repressed as best I
could, by habitual masturbation and by the regular diet and
exercise which academic life made possible.
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