d Latin books. The young man was studying both;
it excited my curiosity. Here were other things of which I knew nothing,
and I began at this period to be oppressed continually by the more and
more frequent discovery of the extent of my ignorance. Luckily I knew
how to read. My rustic mentors had warned me against girls, but never of
books. I found in the Professor's library a queer assortment of odds and
ends of learned works. There was a shelf of theology and missionary
records, doubtless collected when he was a minister; many shelves of
medical books, and a small number of miscellaneous works, histories and
cyclopaedias. Among these latter I chanced one day to take down
Whelpley's Compend of History. All that I can remember of it now are its
stories of ancient heroes, Alexander, Caesar, the greater and lesser men
of Greek and Roman annals. That of Alexander made the deepest impression
upon me; I know not why, perhaps his conquests, his glory, his youth. I
scarcely knew before what the word hero meant. It was a mark of utter
inexperience and a visionary temperament that my ambition should have
been so aroused by the career of an ancient hero instead of the man who
had invented a self-cocking pistol. It was to be two thousand years
behind the times, in an age when half a generation is sufficient to
write you down as belated and not wanted. However, it is well to have a
hero in youth, an example, a spur, a Bucephalus, although one gets many
a fall before he reaches the goal, and I can date my desire to know more
and to achieve something from the reading of that brief compend of
ancient history.

If ever a man finds a path to the true life, he experiences two
awakenings, the intellectual and the spiritual, and it matters little
which is first. In Worcester I stumbled upon the two books in the space
of three years, which led me from darkness to day. The first was that I
have just described; the other was of somewhat the same character,
Emerson's Representative Men.

The beech at last divides the rock in whose invisible seam its tiny seed
was sown. I now began to spend all my leisure time in reading, and to be
more and more aware of my unprofitable and aimless life. Books carried
me this way and that. I was wholly overcome by them as by a strong
personal influence, especially when I read Byron. The student whom I
have mentioned had a few books of poetry, and among them the complete
works of Byron in one thick volume bound