Father and Son by Edmund Gosse

LITTLE boys from quiet, pious households, commonly found, in those days, a chasm yawning at the feet of their inexperience when they arrived at Boarding-school. But the fact that I still slept at home on Saturday and Sunday nights preserved me, I fancy, from many surprises. There was a crisis, but it was broad and slow for me. On the other hand, for my Father I am inclined to think that it was definite and sharp. Permission for me to desert the parental hearth, even for five days in certain weeks, was tantamount, in his mind, to admitting that the great scheme, so long caressed, so passionately fostered, must in its primitive bigness be now dropped.

The Great Scheme (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, 'to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the Lord'. That had been the aspiration of my Mother, and at her death she had bequeathed that desire to my Father, like a dream of the Promised Land. In their ecstasy, my parents had taken me, as Elkanah and Hannah had long ago taken Samuel, from their mountain-home of Ramathaim-Zophim down to sacrifice to the Lord of Hosts in Shiloh. They had girt me about with a linen ephod, and had hoped to leave me there; 'as long as he liveth,' they had said, 'he shall be lent unto the Lord.'