home, again taking a young fellow
with me. I was then practically engaged to Ursula North, and I wrote
her a poem on reaching home. About the middle of April I left home for
Cooperstown Seminary. I rode to Moresville with Jim Bouton, and as the
road between there and Stamford was so blocked with snowdrifts that the
stage could not run, I was compelled to walk the eight miles, leaving
my trunk behind. From Stamford I reached Cooperstown after an all-night
ride by stage.

My summer at Cooperstown was an enjoyable and a profitable one. I
studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry. If I
remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the whole school.
I joined the Websterian Society and frequently debated, and was one of
the three or four orators chosen by the school to "orate" in a grove on
the shore of the lake, on the Fourth of July. I held forth in the true
spread-eagle style.

I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing on the
lake, with the zest of youth.

One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for books
of essays. It was at this time that I took my first bite into Emerson,
and it was like tasting a green apple--not that he was unripe, but I
wasn't ripe for him. But a year later I tasted him again, and said,
"Why, this tastes good"; and took a bigger bite; then soon devoured
everything of his I could find.

I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted the
essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first person,
but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of Dr. Johnson's
did. I think I bought Dick's works on the strength of his opening
sentence--"Man is a compound being."

As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he passes through!
About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my favorite poet.
His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's "Night Thoughts" also
struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to me a much greater writer than
Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and
Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned to care for.

I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right
lines--from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct.
Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and
instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases me. I
would have the author take no thought of his style, a