[3] They were not able to send him to college, but he received a scholarship to Boston University,[5] then to Harvard where he studied under George Lyman Kittredge and William James.

He later wrote his impressions of that earlier Madison: In September, 1906, I needed these quiet inland lakes and bluffs, these wooded shores, these long coulees and sunny oak-openings, and these west winds of Wisconsin as badly as any one who ever came....

But had I not needed them as a weary man, sick of nerves and spirit, my eye would still have drunk in the beauty of town and country-side with eager delight....

[3] Hallmarks of Craftsman style in this house are the exposed rafter tails, the wide eaves,[7] and the rather simple design which highlights the beauty of the materials rather than machine-made ornament.

[3] William later wrote of building the house in his autobiography The Locomotive God: We had built a simple cottage overlooking Lake Wingra and its woods, ... We feared it was rather far out from town and my work; but the scene out there was so lovely, so quiet, and our best friends had their flowery homes out there.

While it was a-building, we could ride over on our bicycles... every day... or twice a day... in July, stakes along the green earth cleared of brush... a brown square home... the shape of a house already... we could see where the kitchen and the study were to be... talks with the kindly contractor on the precise brick for chimney and for fireplace... by October, twilights on the sun-parlor seat, as yet without paint, amid the sawdust and shavings with the same pine-smell I had loved in boyhood's carpenter-shop.

A poplar... a tamarack... a pine... a cedar... a mountain ash... elms on the tree-lawn... the glad gifts from the private nursery of next-door neighbor, a suburban Thoreau.

Wild honeysuckle bushes from my foragings in near-by thickets... flower-garden of larkspur and hollyhock and all the names of blue and gold and scarlet....Meantime my wife created all the indoors...

[8] One of his students described his teaching in a survey of modern poetry: At the University of Wisconsin, Leonard's presence, his tall gray-clad figure with its shock of white hair, and his loosely knotted 'Windsor' bow tie, whose Bohemian, almost Byronic, negligence was an attractive contrast to the formal, if decidedly unpedantic, manner of his speech and appearance, created an 'atmosphere' to all undergraduates who were interested in poetry.

Those students who survived the severe discipline of his seemingly innocent course in Anglo-Saxon, which included comparative studies of Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Latin and Icelandic literatures as well... emerged with a renewed respect for the power of language and its relationship to poetry.

The course was ill-attended, for it demanded an almost selfless devotion to poetry and a Puritan toughness of fiber to withstand Leonard's oral examinations... To the Middle West, Leonard brought his associations of a New England heritage, which included a Protestant-Abolitionist spirit that had turned against itself in violent self-criticism of its despised 'Puritanism and prudery'...[9]At the house on Adams Street he wrote his Poems 1914-1916, The Lynching Bee, a verse translation of Beowulf, his autobiographical The Locomotive God, and other works.

[3] This is the start of a poem that describes the couple's attachment to the house in that period: The Wife Ten years you've sat (within the room you wrought) To guard me from the Fear Except for hurried trip (when I was out) Down town... and near, quite near.

Ten years together we have hugged our home Because of this fierce Fear, And made our prison-close a world to roam, ...[6] In 1925 an incident on a summer hike triggered a downward spiral.

William became less able to travel and he and Charlotte ended up leaving the house they had built to return to the apartment at 433 North Murray Street, closer to his classes.

[3] UW philosophy professor Albert Gustav Ramsperger and his wife Peggy moved into the house on Adams Street in 1938, bought it from Charlotte Leonard in 1944, and lived there until 1992, raising their family in it.

Ernest Meyer wrote of that last phase of Leonard's life, in the apartment on Murray Street: His comings and goings are confined to a beaten track in an area no larger than Battery Park.

But his intelligence and creative vitality embrace the globe, penetrate thirty centuries, are at home in a dozen literatures and languages, and crack the walls of his prison to live in freedom with the free.