ions, having an intense enthusiasm for art, to which I wished
to devote myself.

The collective decision, in which my father and myself were alike
overruled, was that I should go to Union College, in Schenectady,
as the collegiate education was supposed to be a facilitation for
whatever occupation I might afterwards decide on. This was, so far as
I was concerned, a fatal error, and one of a kind far too common in
New England communities, where education is estimated by the extent
of the ground it covers, without relation to the superstructure to
be raised on it. I had always been a greedy reader of books, and
especially of histories and the natural sciences,--everything in the
vegetable or animal world fascinated me,--and I had no ambition for
academic honors, nor did I ever acquire any, but I passionately
desired a technical education in the arts, and the decision of the
family deferred the first steps in that direction for years, and
precisely those years when facility of hand is most completely
acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest--the years
when, if ever, the artist is made.

That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life
is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose
professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well
recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted
from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or
sequence. It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years
ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with
the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the
attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery
in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is
so great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a
specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years
in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement. There
will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study's sake is
invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that
it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be
content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in
those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the
following of them. In my case the result of the imposed career was a
disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to whi