THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS IS HIS ALSO.

On September 18, 1938, toward early sunset, I stood before the Middlebury College Mead Memorial Chapel and read this Biblical inscription (Psalms, 95: 4) chiseled in marble across the facade of its portico. The chapel, a Greek classical structure with six marble columns across the portico, was topped by a white New England meeting house steeple reaching toward heaven. In its Biblical emblem, mixed architecture, and Vermont setting, the chapel embodied perfectly the Congregational Calvinist origins of Middlebury College in 1800, as evolved into a modern, rural, New England liberal arts college.

The chapel faced toward the east and was silhouetted on the rim of a long sloping hill overlooking the gray-granite, ivy-covered buildings of "Old Stone Row" on the lower campus. Beyond these buildings, farther downhill, lay the village of Middlebury , shire town of Addison County, largely hidden under green summer foliage, but flecked here and there by the first faint gold of approaching Indian summer. From the northeast the dark green shadow of Chipman Hill covered the village. Five miles or so farther east the low-lying Front range of the Green Mountains rose three to four thousand feet above Champlain Valley , running north and south to each horizon. At their rim against the sky the dark, unevenly shadowed ranges were touched here and there with a purple glow, a gold and maroon haze, from the sun fading below the Adirondack Mountains twelve miles to the west, beyond Lake Champlain. To the northeast, past the villages of Bristol and Lincoln, Mount Ellen rose 4,135 feet above the valley. Six miles to the southeast lay the tiny village of East Middlebury, nestled against the foot of Ripton Gorge, along which ran state highway 125, the road that wound its way four miles through the first range of the Green Mountains to the village of Ripton. Three miles or so beyond were the Bread Loaf Inn and the Middlebury College mountain campus of the Bread Loaf School of English. The cottages of the campus lay on both sides of the road, in an open clearing of a large plateau surrounded by evergreen forests and mountain ranges. Almost directly north was the most conspicuous landmark from the campus, Bread Loaf Mountain, rising 3,823 feet high.

Standing there before the chapel steps that September evening I was almost totally unfamiliar with the geography of Vermont and the history and character of Middlebury College. I had arrived only the day before, hitchhiking up from New Jersey, to enter Middlebury as a freshman in the class of 1942. I had come up two days early, to find work so I could earn my way through college. Since the events that had finally led me to Middlebury had great bearing upon my college life, and eventually determined my going to Bread Loaf for eight summers, it is necessary to review briefly my earlier schooling and my literary experience before I met Robert Frost.

In 1923, when I was three years old, my parents had moved out of the "Ironbound" slums of Newark, New Jersey, where I was born, to the beautiful rural suburb of Nutley. I grew up in ideal surroundings and graduated from Nutley High School in June 1937. But the United States was still in the great depression, and my family had a very hard struggle to survive. Between June 1937 and September 1938 I spent months in fruitless searching for work. After making the rounds of shops and factories each morning, I usually spent my afternoons and evenings in the Nutley Public Library. In fourteen months I read several hundreds of books - much history, politics, and science, some philosophy, but particularly the fine arts and literature.

I read voraciously yet selectively in the whole range of English and American fiction, drama, and poetry. Since childhood I had had an intense and natural affinity for poetry, graduating from Mother Goose and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses to the poetry anthologies of Louis Untermeyer used as texts in high school. I had soon discovered that when I liked a poem, often a single reading enabled me to retain it in memory and to quote it in full, almost regardless of its length. Later, when I came to know Frost well, he said my acute memory for poetry was the result of "out-of-school" and "self-assigned" readings, rather than "in- school" and "laid-on" education. However it may be explained, I read poetry in the spirit of what Frost in "A Tuft of Flowers" called "sheer morning gladness at the brim" (p. 23 ). Undoubtedly, Frost was largely right. The poems lodged in my mind because I read them with all the intense and spontaneous enthusiasm of uncritical youth, with an intuitional love, or what Frost called "passionate preference" (Interviews, p. 208), and not as a body of academic knowledge to be learned. During the fourteen months prior to entering Middlebury I read and retained in memory thousands of lines of poetry, from Shakespeare's sonnets, lyrics, and plays; from the poems of Ben Jonson, Donne, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets; from Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thompson, Gray, Blair, Young, Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith; from all the major and some minor Romantic and Victorian poets; and from the modern British and American poets in the latest edition of Untermeyer's anthology, including Frost. Among American nineteenth century poets I knew to memory many poems of Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Crane, Dickinson, and others.

Although I did not realize it then, I was really preparing myself in the best possible manner for entering Middlebury, for my summers at Bread Loaf, and for my conversations with Frost. But because of the depressed economic condition of my family, and my inability to find work, until Christmas of 1937 I had not entertained any hope of going to college at all. Then by chance I met a history teacher I had known in Nutley High School. About the middle of December Miss Esther Byerley found me reading in the library, and with the help of one of my high school English teachers, Miss Ida Cone, who had sent several students to Middlebury College, encouraged me to apply for admission. In February 1938 I was admitted with a half tuition scholarship. Through odd jobs during the spring and summer I managed to save fifty dollars, my total financial resources when I journeyed to Middlebury on September 17 to look for work.

The next day I managed to find four meager jobs - as usher in a theater downtown; as a page in the college library; as attendance officer in daily and Sunday chapel; and as a campus mailman, delivering mail and notices from the administration offices in Old Chapel to the various faculty offices. All these jobs together were not enough to cover my room, board, and books, and beyond these expenses I still needed to raise half of my tuition. But that evening, in front of the chapel, entranced by the magnificence of the campus setting and distant mountains, I had pushed my economic problems completely out of my mind, so that for a moment I was hardly aware that a man had come out of the chapel and was standing next to me.

He was tall, white-haired, and somewhat frail; he was well-dressed and carried a black cane. He had the dignified, formal bearing of a Victorian gentleman, and looked like the very image of a picture I had seen of John Galsworthy. He smiled broadly, shook my hand, asked my name and home town, and whether I was to be a student at the College. Soon we were launched on an animated conversation about the College and various academic subjects, and particularly on the place of literature in a liberal education. Newman's The Idea of a University, which I had read with great satisfaction just before going to Middlebury, provided the basis for my convictions. As we talked we strolled slowly down the long walk from the chapel to the lower campus, where for about a half hour we talked within the shadow of Old Chapel as darkness descended. Then the white-haired gentleman suddenly said goodbye and walked away. I was mortified to discover that although he had probed my mind, I had neglected to ask anything about him. I hadn't even gotten his name. I was acutely embarrassed over my bad manners.

Early the next afternoon when I went to the college mail room in Old Chapel to pick up campus mail for distribution, to my surprise I found a note in my box asking me to go immediately to the office of Dr. Paul D. Moody, President of Middlebury College. I went upstairs and gave my name to his secretary. To my greater surprise she recognized my name. She ushered me into the president's office, and to my utter amazement there stood the white-haired gentleman I had met outside the chapel. He smiled indulgently at my obvious stupefaction. Dr. Moody quickly put me at ease by assuring me that our conversation of the previous evening had pleased him. He wished to continue it and discuss some matters relating to my coming year at Middlebury. In the next half hour I listened and learned a great deal about President Moody. He was the son of the famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899); he had been head Protestant chaplain in the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War One; he had met such luminaries as Marshal Foch and Sergeant York; he had known intimately and was a close friend of Father Francis P. Duffy, the famous chaplain of the New York City regiments of the Forty-second Rainbow Division; he had been appointed President of Middlebury College in 1921; his daughter, Charlotte Moody, had literary talents of the kind I admired, and had published in The Saturday Review of Literature, Harpers, and various magazines of fiction. By an easy transition from things personal to him to things literary , President Moody steered his monologue to the main purpose of our meeting. From fragments in our recent conversation he had pieced together the facts about my economic plight. He told me that out of his "President's Purse," a fund provided by the College for use at his discretion, he would pay the balance of my tuition for my freshman year. Before I had recovered sufficiently to thank him for this startling generosity, President Moody told me he had also asked the registrar to schedule me in the freshman English class to be taught by Professor Harry G. Owen. With that, President Moody shook my hand warmly, wished me well, asked me to drop in occasionally for a chat during the coming months, and ushered me out.

On the same day that classes began at Middlebury , September 21, 1938, a devastating hurricane swept across the northeastern United States, killing nearly 700 people, and damaging property worth tens of millions of dollars. Near Middlebury the hurricane washed out highways and bridges, stranding some parents of students for days. Symbolically, this regional catastrophe, and the resulting physical damage and dislocation of human lives, was but a prelude to what the whole civilized world was soon to experience in World War Two. On our first day of classes Czechoslovakia capitulated to Hitler's partition ultimatum. Four years later almost to the day, I was to be inducted into the United States Air Corps at Fort Dix. Meanwhile, against the background of the politics and violence of approaching war, I plunged into the calm but intellectually exhilarating academic world of Middlebury and the Bread Loaf School of English, a highly civilized, aesthetically oriented, and idealistic world, peopled with scores of outstanding teachers, scholars, poets, writers, fellow students, and a variety of remarkable characters.

Soon after classes began I discovered why President Moody had steered me into Professor Owen's English class. Owen was a brilliant and highly articulate teacher, thoroughly educated in the fine arts as well as in literature. He had a catholic literary taste that included an appreciation of the best in Ancient, Classical, Metaphysical, Romantic, and Modern literature. He was intensely devoted to music and was a very accomplished pianist. Freshman English at Middlebury consisted of a year-long survey course in English literature, with reading selections from Beowulf through Thomas Hardy, in two large volumes. But Owen demanded much more than the rest of his colleagues. He assigned supplementary readings: a Shakespearean tragedy, comedy, and history; an eighteenth and nineteenth century novel; Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson; and selected essays in literary criticism. He also required two or three brief themes each week, written on the daily assigned readings. By June 1939 I had written over forty critical papers for Owen, thus deepening, extending, consolidating, and systematizing my knowledge and understanding of English literature. Owen was a strict disciplinarian, and held frequent conferences with his students to improve their writing. Although I had entered Middlebury as a physics major, I soon shifted to English because I was more interested in people than in atoms and molecules, and Owen became my academic advisor. Before going to Middlebury I had become interested in writing, both poetry and prose. I had composed about twenty lyric poems, mostly sonnets, and had written some reflective essays. Owen provided great critical perspective for my work.

Before Christmas recess, largely through Owen's teaching and conferences, but also through the example of two other faculty members at Middlebury, Professors Vernon G. Harrington in philosophy and Reginald L. Cook in American Literature, I had decided that for my life's work I wanted to teach literature in a college and to write. But the whole course of my graduate studies in literature, and of my professional life, was to be determined by Robert Frost.

In addition to his teaching skill, Owen possessed great social charm and tact and was an outstanding administrator. In 1937 President Moody had appointed him Dean of the Bread Loaf School of English. (Several years later, after Owen became academic dean at Rutgers University, I learned from Frost that President Moody had groomed Owen to succeed him as president of Middlebury College, but that the War had destroyed this plan.) In January 1939, Owen offered me a scholarship and all expenses to attend the Bread Loaf School for the coming summer, in exchange for waiting on table. He reminded me that to teach in a college I would need M.A. and Ph.D. degrees and that going to Bread Loaf was the first step toward these academic goals. Owen agreed with the philosophy of education then practiced under Robert M. Hutchins at the University of Chicago, that a student should be allowed to proceed according to his proven ability and attained knowledge and skill, rather than through a piecemeal system of fixed earned credits. If I could handle the graduate courses at Bread Loaf, Owen argued, I should be able to earn credits toward an M.A. even before getting the B.A. He also noted that at Bread Loaf I would have an opportunity to study with outstanding English teachers from all over the United States, under ideal conditions, and that this would make me a stronger undergraduate English student. His clinching point was that I would meet Robert Frost at Bread Loaf and that after the summer school session I could stay over for the last two weeks in August and attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

But the hard-pressing facts of economics stood in the way of accepting Owen's very tempting offer. I believed it was essential to earn money over the summer for my sophomore year and to secure the B.A. before being concerned about advanced degrees. I discussed my problem with "Gramps" Harrington. He had taught for thirteen summers at Bread Loaf, from 1920, the year the school was founded, through 1932. He knew Frost well and had a very high opinion of the poet. He advised me to take the long range view, to ignore economics, live on faith, and go to Bread Loaf. I then consulted "Doc" Cook, whom I had come to admire as a man and a teacher. Cook had taken his M.A. at Bread Loaf in 1926, and he too was a good friend of Frost. He urged me to go to Bread Loaf, saying that the opportunity to know Frost was the greatest education in the liberal arts I could possibly get anywhere. President Moody reinforced the advice of Harrington and Cook and assured me that my full tuition scholarship would be extended as long as my academic record was good. He suggested that I apply to the Middlebury Inn for a job during my sophomore year; I did and secured a job that gave me room and board starting in September. I then accepted Owen's offer.

"Robert Frost at Bread Loaf, 1939" Part I

In Part I, a youthful Peter Stanlis and his classmates meet Frost

for the first time in a little cottage in Ripton.

"All the way home I kept remembering"