My summer at Cooperstown was an enjoyable and a profitable one. I studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry. If I remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the whole school. I joined the Websterian Society and frequently debated, and was one of the three or four orators chosen by the school to "orate" in a grove on the shore of the lake, on the Fourth of July. I held forth in the true spread-eagle style.
I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing on the lake, with the zest of youth.
One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for books of essays. It was at this time that I took my first bite into Emerson, and it was like tasting a green apple—not that he was unripe, but I wasn't ripe for him. But a year later I tasted him again, and said, "Why, this tastes good"; and took a bigger bite; then soon devoured everything of his I could find.
I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted the essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first person, but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of Dr. Johnson's did. I think I bought Dick's works on the strength of his opening sentence—"Man is a compound being."
As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he passes through! About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my favorite poet. His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's "Night Thoughts" also struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to me a much greater writer than Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned to care for.
I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right lines—from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct. Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases me. I would have the author take no thought of his style, as such; yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so much the better. Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer's mind, how it takes us!
My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It took me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe, if I have ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I really saw and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my writing when I see it—tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my sentences glance off and fail to reach the quick.
(In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown, after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The lake and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them forty-six years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered. Of the old seminary only the foundations were standing, and the trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place. I again dipped my oar in the lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and threaded some of the streets I had known so well. I wished I could have been alone there.... I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the presence of strangers. I could not quite get a glimpse of the world as it appeared to me in those callow days. It was here that I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical Chapter') and first dipped into Emerson."
After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the young student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall, when he began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he taught until the following spring, returning East to marry, as he says, "the girl I left behind me."
He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until the fall of 1863. As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home farm.