y
of the law. What is the intellectual record of these nine years? It is
obvious that they were years unfavorable to systematic training of
any sort, or to any regulated acquisition of knowledge. During all
that time in his life, as we now look back upon it, he has for us the
aspect of some lawless, unkempt genius, in untoward circumstances,
groping in the dark, not without wild joy, towards his inconceivable,
true vocation; set to tasks for which he was grotesquely unfit;
blundering on from misfortune to misfortune, with an overflow of
unemployed energy and vivacity that swept him often into rough fun,
into great gusts of innocent riot and horseplay; withal borne along,
for many days together, by the mysterious undercurrents of his nature,
into that realm of reverie where the soul feeds on immortal fruit and
communes with unseen associates, the body meanwhile being left to the
semblance of idleness; of all which the man himself might have given
this valid justification:--

"I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."

Nevertheless, these nine years of groping, blundering, and seeming
idleness were not without their influence on his intellectual
improvement even through direct contact with books. While still a boy
in his teens, and put prematurely to uncongenial attempts at
shopkeeping and farmkeeping, he at any rate made the great discovery
that in books and in the gathering of knowledge from books could be
found solace and entertainment; in short, he then acquired a taste for
reading. No one pretends that Patrick Henry ever became a bookish
person. From the first and always the habit of his mind was that of
direct action upon every subject that he had to deal with, through his
own reflection, and along the broad primary lines of common sense.
There is never in his thought anything subtle or recondite,--no mental
movement through the media of books; but there is good evidence for
saying that this bewildered and undeveloped youth, drifting about in
chaos, did in those days actually get a taste for reading, and that he
never lost it. The books which he first read are vaguely described as
"a few light and elegant authors,"[16] probably in English essays and
fiction. As the years passed and the boy's mind matured, he rose to
more serious books. He became fond of geography and of history, and he
pushed his readings, especially, into the history of Greece and of
Rom