remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller
told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth
was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk-
lore and literature, which he never did.

The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after
Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called "The Poetical
Epitome." It consisted of many of Percy's "Relics" with selections of
ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few
years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before.

As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as
learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker's school, and put me
under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia.
This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as
curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild
speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who
ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not
really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at
geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own
sweet will. His forte was "moral influence" and "sympathetic
intellectual communion" by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was!
He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to
discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a
marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything
and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of
age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen"
actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud,
reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi
Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's
Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul,
educating me indeed "ideally" as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever
been educated, at the utter cost of all real "education." It was a great
pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true. The word _ideal_ was ever in his mouth.
All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be
ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in