“I know it ranks high as a literary institution, but the influence it exerts in a religious way is most horrible—even worse than Universalism.”
Anderson Dana had a horror of Unitarianism, and had heard that Charles was attending Unitarian meetings.
“Ponder well the paths of thy feet,” he wrote in solemn warning to his perilously venturesome son, “lest they lead down to the very gates of hell.”
Dana entered college without difficulty, and devoted much of his time to philosophy and general literature. He wrote to his friend, Dr. Austin Flint, whom he had met in Buffalo, and who had advised him to go to Harvard.
I am in the focus of what Professor Felton calls “supersublimated transcendentalism,” and to tell the truth, I take to it rather kindly, though I stumble sadly at some notions.
This was not strange, for besides hearing Unitarian discourse, young Dana was attending Emerson’s lectures at Harvard and reading Carlyle.
CHARLES A. DANA AT THIRTY-EIGHT
A Photograph Taken in 1857 When He Was Managing Editor of the New York “Tribune.”
In his first term Dana stood seventh in a class of seventy-four. In the spring of 1840 he left Cambridge, but pursued the university studies at the home of his uncle in Guildhall, Vermont. Here, at an expense of about a dollar a week, he put in eight hours a day at his books, and for diversion went shooting or tinkered in the farm shop. His sister, then fifteen years old, was there, and he helped her with her studies.