Excerpt from Tyne Chylde: My Life and Teaching, Partly in the Daylight of Fact, Partly in the Limelight of Fancy

Born What poetry is in that syllable, yet we talk of keeping to facts! As well tell a tree to keep to roofs when it is climbing up to the sun, shooting out in huge branches, glowing into blossom, and maturing into fruit The tree is the poetry of the root. Born, and born in quaint old Hexham, magnificent in antiquity, justly claiming to be a creation of Rome itself. That quaint town, rising in the quietness of old age over the silvery Tyne, witnessed the episcopal splendour of St. Wilfrid, himself a true Northumbrian and the most famous Saxon prelate that ever invoked the Pontifi's protection. A town to be proud of, surely! A see, a manor, a county, twelve hundred years ago!

There I was born in I8 30, and there I lived for two-and-twenty years. I see it all now with closed eyes; its famed old abbey, its old-world marketplace, its ever-flowing pant, the ancient town hall of its own bishops and priors, its narrow streets, its environs of green undulations and sweet villages. I see the thriving tradesmen, the Mechanics' Institute where I borrowed my first books, the schoolmaster from whom I learned that all Gaul is divided into three parts, the other schoolmaster who punctuated his curt instructions with savage blows, then the reverend schoolmaster who benignly - being well chastened by his partner in life - helped me to hear the fabled goddess sing the destroying anger of Achilles son of Peleus, and lastly, the other reverend tutor by whose help I made my way into the original eloquence of the world's best book. I see them all, and hear them - and on they pass, and on, on, as in a dream.

What is my life? Any human life P A mystery; a cloud, dark, yet edged with light, like the outside of heaven, with wavelets of overflowing glory - like a great May-be, a possibility, a destiny - a Ghost that may darken into a fiend or brighten into an angel. I cannot tell what my life is - it is so much, so little it is a killing pain, it is a maddening joy, a delirious gladness, and a very pit of horror. So strange - it slopes up to heaven like an easy hill, then suddenly breaks off, and lo I must come down again, or fall into mist, into gloom, into death.

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