bought the precious volume at the cost of my breakfast for several
weeks, so slender were my resources. In the course of three or four
years I added to my library Milton's poems, a volume of Tennyson and
three of Potter's translation of Euripides; the latter, not because I
wanted it, but because I happened to have made the final bid at a book
auction. In Representative Men I found the meat my nature craved. In all
previous histories and biographies that I had read, there was much going
round and about poets and heroes, an external, academic treatment; with
Emerson I seemed to come nearer the possible ideal which was already
vaguely outlined in my mind. Besides there was much else than Napoleon
and Shakespeare in the pages. There were the moral and poetic insights,
and, moreover, there was the style, the vital and penetrating
Emersonianism, which aroused, and no doubt, dazzled the youthful and
impressionable reader. Emerson's terse epigrammatic method of writing
was congenial to my inability to follow difficult logic. His style
seemed to me the poetical foil of all the prosers of all time. Through
the reading of this book eventually I became acquainted with Emerson,
Alcott and Thoreau. They became my teachers; I followed them until, by
their guidance, I was enlarged enough to find my own way into
companionship with those poets and thinkers, who have endured through
the ages. May I never forget to acknowledge my debt to those men of
Concord, my earliest masters in fidelity to ideals and the inward light.

CONCLUSION

I began to write these confidences of boyhood for my own pleasure. If I
were to continue them into manhood I could not find nor distinguish
myself. It would be like emerging suddenly from solitude into a crowd.
The bright days of childhood easily separate themselves from all later
time, and are painted with the free pencil of the imagination. I have
now come almost to the wide gateways of the world where I must join the
indistinguishable procession and begin to forget myself in its alluring
enchantments.

With the discovery of certain books of ancient history, Plutarch,
Euripides and Emerson's Essays there came an unexpected close to my
student life at the Worcester Academy. Several of my classmates and
myself agreed that we could be better fitted for college at Phillips
Academy, Andover, than where we were, and accordingly we put ourselves
under the tuition of Dr. Samuel H. Taylor, at that time the